Roland Hardenberg

In 1998 he received his doctorate from the Free University of Berlin with a thesis on "The Rebirth of the Gods: Ritual and Society in Orissa" and was subsequently a research assistant in the Department of Ethnology.

In October 2016, he accepted the offer of a W3 professorship for ethnology at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and became the new director of the Frobenius Institute in January 2017, succeeding Karl-Heinz Kohl.

Based on ethnographic studies in India and Kyrgyzstan, his research aims at understanding local practices that are expressions of shared socio-cosmic ideas.

In India and Kyrgyzstan, these include in particular religious practices such as rituals, sacrifices, pilgrimages and burials as well as exchanges that suggest specific conceptions of "kinship", "friendship", "neighborhood", etc.

He works with techniques of empirical field research in the context of long-term stays mainly in rural areas of South and Central Asia.