Regionaler Schwerpunkt: Das Chota Nagpur Plateau als Stammeszone Mittelindiens; insbesondere West Singhbhum in Jharkhand und Mayurbhanj in Odisha
Adivasi (Erstssiedler) des südasiatischen Subkontinents; insbesondere Ho, Santal, Munda und weitere Stammesgesellschaften auf den Hochplateaus Mittelindiens; Verwandtschafts- und Heiratsbeziehungen; Ritualfreundschaft; Kommunikation zwischen den Lebenden und den Toten; soziokulturelle Normen.
Curriculum vitae
In 2003 Eva Reichel began to read Social and Cultural Anthropology as a full senior student at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin. Before that she had completed a teaching career of almost 25 years at a German grammar school.
After a first visit to the area of her later research among the Ho people in 2004 and the completion of her MA in 2008 she was asked to continue her studies under the supervision of Professor Pfeffer, Berlin. Before and after going to the field in Middle India for long term participatory research in 2009/ 2010 she was teaching Bachelor students as a senior lecturer and research associate at the Institute of Ethnology of the Free University. Since then Mrs Reichel has been working on her doctoral thesis which she submitted in February 2018 at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main. She successfully passed the disputation of her dissertation in November 2018.
While writing up the dissertation, Mrs Reichel attended anthropological congresses in a number of European and non-European countries, became a member of EASA, revisited ‘the field’ almost every other year, and published a number of essays and articles (see publications).
A few years ago she became Associate Fellow at the University of Groningen, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies alongside Marine Carrin, Alpa Shah, Chris Gregory, Piers Vitebsky, Georg Pfeffer. Here she had attended two summer schools before and met Piers Vitebsky in person whose gift of presenting his fieldwork among the Sora of southern Odisha greatly inspired Mrs Reichel's understanding of the tribal universe.
Her present research focusses on literature written by a Ho in his mother tongue (and rendered in Devanagari) on specific aspects of the Ho's socio-cosmic universe. It thus constitutes one of the extremely rare instances of texts composed between 1978 and 1982 in Ho for Ho people. The project is about rendering these texts (1400 pages) into English while highlighting the Ho's language, and edit the volumes.
Publications
2009. Notions of Life in Death and Dying. The Dead in Tribal Middle India. New Delhi: Manohar
2014. Exploring illness: Notes from recent fieldwork among the Ho. In Behera, Deepak Kumar (ed.). Contemporary Society: Tribal Studies. Vol. 9. New Delhi: Concept Publishing: 32-46.
2014. Concepts of Children and Childhood in Anthropology and in a Tribal Community of Middle India. The Oriental Anthropologist. Vol. 14 (2): 189-201.
2015. Concepts of Children and Childhood in Anthropology and in a Tribal Community of Middle India. In Behera, D.K. (ed.). Contemporary Society: Tribal Studies. Vol. 10. New Delhi: Concept Publishing: 24-38.
2017. On Death and the Ho's Relationship with their Dead. In Skoda, Uwe and Biswamoy Pati (eds.). Highland Odisha. Life and Society Beyond the Coastal World. Delhi: Primus Books: 107-135.
2018. Scholarly Commitment. John Deeney and the Ho of Kolhan. In Pfeffer, Georg and Nibedita Nath (eds.). Empirical Anthropology. Issues of Academic Friends and Friends in the Field. Delhi: Concept Publishing: 194-205.
2018. Narrations of Commitment. Friends in the Field. In Pfeffer, Georg and Nibedita Nath (eds.). Empirical Anthropology. Issues of Academic Friends and Friends in the Field. Delhi: Concept Publishing: 187-193.
