Prof. Dr. Heike Drotbohm

I am a social and cultural anthropologist whose research has focused for many years on relational configurations, particularly kinship, intergenerational relations, and care in transnational and urban lifeworlds across Brazil, the Caribbean, and West Africa. From a praxeological and phenomenological perspective, I am broadly interested in the question of what holds social formations together—such as families, friendships, solidarity networks, or ethnic affiliations—in everyday worlds shaped by cross-border social ties. More specifically, I examine how people experience, negotiate, and enact belonging when formerly taken-for-granted forms of social attachment appear to be destabilized by broader social and societal transformations.

The subproject conducted during the first funding phase of this Collaborative Research Centre (CRC), conducted in Brazil and Portugal, examined informal support structures, including church-based networks, soup kitchens, neighbourhood assistance initiatives, and activist solidarity communities. In the second phase, our focus concentrates on Brazil and explores the interconnections between state-mediated pathways of assistance and individual status transitions. We are particularly interested in the extent to which different forms of mobility—such as intra-urban mobility, Indigenous mobility, forced displacement, or migration—are implicated in practices of differentiation and categorization.

Why human differentiation?

The provision of assistance—whether in the context of welfare-state programmes, humanitarian aid, or pro-migrant support within solidarity networks—fundamentally relies on a distinction between those who give and those who receive. How this distinction is understood and managed—whether it is regarded as useful, desirable, something to be avoided, or politically problematic—is an empirical question that lies at the heart of our project. We are interested both in the cognitive and administrative forms of “sorting work” embedded in relationships of assistance and in the less conscious distinctions that operate through affective and emotional dynamics. Such distinctions may be reinforced by social actors themselves, but they may also be ignored, denied, contested, or strategically subverted.

Foto: Stephanie Füssenich