inherit fellowship at HU Berlin for Christof Lammer

From April 2024 to March 2025, Christof Lammer will be researching at the Humboldt University of Berlin how kinship measurements make giant pandas a natural heritage worth protecting.

The social anthropologist Christof Lammer, postdoc assistant at the Department of Society, Knowledge & Politics at the University of Klagenfurt, was invited to a one-year fellowship at HU Berlin by the newly founded centre for advanced studies Käte Hamburger Kolleg inherit – Heritage in Transformation. There he is working on the project “Panda Heritage: Kinship Measurements and Life’s Value in Species Conservation”. In doing so, he deepens his interest in the political and economic consequences of kinship measurements and in the material production of value through information infrastructures.

What makes nature valuable and worth protecting as “heritage”? In the case of species conservation efforts, Christof assumes that kinship measurements play a central role when people decide which species and individuals should be protected – and which not.

His previous research has already shown that people measure kinship in different ways in order to decide about human belonging (e.g. citizenship), rights (e.g. inheritance, social benefits and insurance payouts) and obligations (e.g. alimony and care). Kinship is measured using overlapping and competing indicators, such as genealogical distance, lived closeness, phenotypic similarity or genetic dissimilarity.