Prof. Dr. Carola Lentz

Website: https://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/professuren/prof-dr-carola-lentz/

Research Interests:

Ethnicity and nationalism; colonialism and decolonisation; state and family politics of memory; educational biographies and middle classes in the Global South

https://www.goethe.de/de/uun/org/pra/len.html

Biography

Carola Lentz is a social anthropologist and senior research professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. After initial field work in South America, Carola Lentz has conducted research in West Africa for the past forty years. In one of her current book projects, she is tracing her ancestral roots and studying family networks in Germany and Ghana. A second book project is based on long-term research on the biographies, social affiliations and self-images of four generations of educated men and their families from North-Western Ghana. She is also involved in a cooperative American Ghanaian exhibition project on ‘Ghana 1957’. Carola Lentz was president of the Goethe-Institut from 2020 to 2024. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Project Abstract

The project explores the changes in the life courses, career trajectories, social belonging, and self-images of upwardly mobile men in an African society. It looks at four generations of educated men and their families from a marginalised rural area in Northern Ghana who have, after the introduction of the first schools in 1935, eventually made careers in the civil service, the educational sector, and the free professions. My study analyses perceptions and concepts of time in a contemporary African society in transition, from a traditional rural to a modern, stratified, cosmopolitan world. Different understandings of time (e.g. ‘static’ and ‘cyclical’ versus ‘progressive’ and ‘linear’) and of desirable life courses co-exist and intersect, even within extended families. My book project draws on Tamara Hareven’s (1977) triad of individual time—family time—historical time to understand the challenges, opportunities and tensions that educated, upwardly mobile men and women from Northern Ghana face in their biographies. Secondly, I find Karl Mannheim’s (1952) concept of generation useful in order to grasp the self-conscious definition of a particular age cohort as a group that shares particular historical experiences and a certain lifestyle. I am interested in locating changing patterns of life courses in historical time, but also examine how middle-class men and their families themselves perceive time in its various dimensions.

Curriculum vitae

Academic Background

1996

Habilitation, Venia legendi for Anthroplogy, Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences II, Free University Berlin

1987

Doctorate (PhD) at Leibniz University Hanover

1985

MA in Agricultural Sciences of the Tropics and Subtropics, Georg August University Göttingen

1982

Second state examination for the teaching profession at grammar schools, Hamburg

1979

First state examination for teaching at grammar schools, Georg August University Göttingen

1972-1979

Studies of sociology, political science, German studies and education at Georg August-University Göttingen and Free University Berlin

Academic Positions

since 2019

Senior Research Professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

2002-2019

Professor of Anthropology at the Department for Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

1995-2002

Professor of Anthropology at the Department for Historical Ethnology at Goethe University Frankfurt

1987-1992

Lecturer at the Department for Anthropology, Free University Berlin

Honorary Positions, Memberships, Prizes and Awards

2020-2024

President of the Goethe-Institut

2023

Award of the honorary membership of the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology

since 2020

Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina

2018-2020

Vice-President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

2016-2018

Secretary of the German Academy of the Social Sciences Class of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

2011-2015

President of the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology

since 2014

Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

2014

Melville J. Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association for the book Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa (Indiana University Press, 2013)

2013

Award of a Chieftaincy title (Maalu Naa) in the Nandom Traditional Area, Upper West Region, Ghana