Kolleg mourns loss of Keebet von Benda-Beckmann

Unexpectedly, our advisory board member Keebet von Benda-Beckmann died on 5 October 2022 at the age of 75. Ms Benda-Beckmann was on her way to a conference in Münster, her suitcase was already packed, but she never arrived.

As a legal anthropologist, Ms Benda-Beckmann advised the Käte Hamburger Kolleg in particular on the selection of fellows with research interests in non-European modernity. She encouraged us to look beyond national boundaries and to thus broaden our horizons. Through her field research and advanced work on legal pluralism, the Dutch scholar and long-time director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle was an important voice in the research landscape. Now this voice has fallen silent. (Peter Oestmann)