Abstract

The Berlin Study of Rituals and Gestures is a case study in pedagogical anthropology built on a comprehensive understanding of anthropology. It examines the role of rituals and gestures in the four central fields of socialization: family, school, peer group, and media and contributes to the understanding of the importance of rituals in education. It focuses the mimetic, social and performative character of rituals and gestures. In my view anthropology is not only cultural anthropology/ethnology. Anthropology is a decentralized, polycentric field of research in which problems of representation, interpretation, construction, deconstruction, and thus methodological diversity are of central importance. Significant are the following paradigms of Anthropology: evolution/hominization, philosophical anthropology, historical Anthropology, cultural anthropology to find out how to understand the human being in the globalized world of the Anthropocene. Anthropology is characterized by a dual historicity and culturality, that arises from the historicity and culturality of the different perspectives of anthropological researchers and from the historical and cultural character of the contents and subjects of research. Anthropological research often is interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary as well as intercultural and transcultural. Anthropology employs diachronic, synchronic and philosophical methods to investigate human societies and cultures.

Keywords: Educational anthropology, Pedagogical anthropology, Hominization, Philosophical anthropology, Historical anthropology, Cultural anthropology, Ritual, Performativity, Mimesis, Practical knowledge