ISA’s medium-term research program (2021-2023) is entitled “Uncertainties and Inequalities: Engaging with Asian Movements in the Present and Past ”.
They pertain to both contemporary and historic times, and carry particular potential for inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration in the humanities, social and life sciences.
The roots of the current Institute for Social Anthropology can be traced back to March 2, 1938, when the erstwhile Commissions for "Research on Illiterate Languages of Non-European Peoples" and for "Publishing Songs and Texts Recorded in Prisoner of War Camps" at the Austrian Academy of Sciences were merged into the new "Commission for Research on Primitive Cultures and Languages."
From 1980 to 2000 Prof. Walter Dostal substantially expanded the already existing focus on Southeast Asia by two additional core fields – South-Western Arabia and Tibet.
Since 1995, this socio-anthropological research approach follows an interdisciplinary program by conducting empirical and ethnographic investigations in connection with philological and historical analyses and intercultural comparative studies of socio-cultural phenomena.
Researchers on the Middle East examine, inter alia, social transformations and conflicts of South-Western Arabia past and present and the memory of crimes against humanity among Kurdish people.
Methodologically, ISA pursues gender-sensitive ethnographic fieldwork carried out in local languages and systematic cross-cultural comparison in its analyses and interpretations of socio-cultural processes in the past and present.
Occasionally, ISA organizes or co-organizes domestic as well as international conferences and seminars on theoretical-methodological debates, special topics, or regional agendas.