Hermann Amborn (11 April 1933 – 18 June 2024) was a German anthropologist and ethnologist. With a regional focus on northern and eastern Africa, Amborn's research addressed the political organisation of society, the division of labour, agricultural ethnology, and ethics in applied anthropological research.[1][2]
Life and career
Amborn's father was a pastor who opposed the Nazi regime.[1] As a young man, Amborn initially trained as a technical draftsman and engineer before changing fields.[3] Amborn held visiting professorships in Hamburg and Berlin in addition to Kansas State University. He became a full professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1987, where he was made professor emeritus on retirement in 1998.[1] From 1991 to 2001, Amborn was the ethics working group spokesperson for the German Anthropological Association (formerly Deutsche Gesellschaft
für Völkerkunde, now: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozial- und
Kulturanthropologie).[2][4]
Amborn notably contributed to the study and discussion of African communities which self-govern outside of a statist framework through anti-hierarchical structures, without reliance on violent coercion in enforcing their rules and laws, and in line with anarchist principles.[5] Mark Bray describes Amborn's work as "challenging the inevitability of the state as the "natural" outcome of societal evolution"[6]
Amborn died in Munich on 18 June 2024, at the age of 91.[7]
Unbequeme Ethik. Überlegungen zu einer verantwortlichen Ethnologie. Reimer, Berlin 1993, ISBN3496025239
Flexibel aus Tradition / Burji in Äthiopien und Kenia: Unter Verwendung der Aufzeichnungen von Helmut Straube / With explanation of some cultural items in English. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN3447060832
'Concepts in Wood and Stone - Socio-religious Monuments of the Konso of Southern Ethiopia', Zeitschrift für Ethnologi, 2002.
Burji: Versatile by Tradition inChanging Identifications and Alliances in North-East Africa, Volume 1 edited by Günther Schlee and Elizabeth E. Watson. Berghahn Books, 2009.
Mobility, Knowledge and Power: Craftsmen in the Borderland inChanging Identifications and Alliances in North-East Africa, Volume 1 edited by Günther Schlee and Elizabeth E. Watson. Berghahn Books, 2009.
Law as Refuge of Anarchy: Societies without Hegemony or State. Untimely Meditations, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2019.[8]
^ abAmborn, Hermann (July 4, 2008). "Interview Hermann Amborn"(PDF) (pdf). Interviewed by de:Dieter Haller[in German]. "Interviews with German Anthropologists". Archived(PDF) from the original on November 8, 2011.
