Albträume. Perspektiven aus der Sozialanthropologie
Before Jonathan Harker sets off for Transylvania to do business with Count Dracula, his wife is tormented by a nightmare. She speaks to her husband of an unspeakable horror and begs him to forgo his journey. Had he listened to his wife, or rather to her nightmare, he would have stayed alive.
Like Harker, most people do not listen to nightmares. They rather try to get rid of them or prevent their emergence in the first place. Nightmares have also failed to establish themselves as subjects of dream research. Yet nightmares tell us a lot about people's fears, and they do so in culturally coded images that provide insight into collective fears.
In my research project, I am looking at the full scale of nightmares in cultural comparison. I pay particular attention to the way nightmares relate to socio-political organisation.
Florian Mühlfried is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Ilia State University. He has been a Lecturer at the Tbilisi State University, a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, a Visiting Professor at the State University of Campinas (Brazil), and an Assistant Professor at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany). His publications include the monographs Ungovernance and Anti-Governance (2022, in German), Mistrust: A Global Perspective (2019) and Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia (2014), the edited volume Mistrust: Ethnographic Approximations (2018), as well as the co-edited volumes Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces: Religious Pluralism in the Post-Soviet Caucasus (2018) and Exploring the Edge of Empire: Soviet Era Anthropology in the Caucasus and Central Asia (2011). He is an editor of the journal Caucasus Survey and a member of the editorial board of the Cambridge Journal for Anthropology.
Unherrschaft und Gegenherrschaft, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2022.
Misstrauen – Vom Wert eines Unwertes, Stuttgart: Reclam 2019.
Mistrust – A Global Perspective, Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot 2019.
Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia, London, New York: Berghahn 2014.
Postsowjetische Feiern – Das Georgische Bankett im Wandel, Stuttgart: ibidem 2006.
Der Titel des Vortrags kann auf dreierlei Weisen gelesen werden: jedes politische Projekt und Gleichheit selbst können als Albtraum gelesen werden aber auch »real existierender Egalitarismus«. Dieser Albtraum formuliert das Ungewollte der Überwältigung, die nicht alltäglich werden soll.