Heike Behrend: »Schrecknisse des Wissenwollens: Frageverbot und die Fraglichkeit von Fragen in der ethnografischen Feldforschung«

“The Terrors of the Quest for Knowledge: The Prohibition of Questions and the Questionability of Questions in Ethnographic Fieldwork” with Ethel Matala de Mazza.

This lecture addresses questions and their questionable nature, and thus also the questionable nature of the questioning ethnologist during fieldwork.

Starting from the shock of a ban on asking questions imposed on her by the elders during her first fieldwork in northwestern Kenya in the late 1970s, she attempts below to recount fragments of a history of ethnographic questioning.

Ethnographic research emerged from journeys to foreign lands, which evoked a sense of rupture, wonder, and amazement, and thus new questions. The researcher follows Hans Blumenberg’s “process of theoretical curiosity,” tracing the increasing professionalization and scientification of travel up to the development of question catalogs for ethnographic work. Using the examples of the research conducted by Bronisław Malinowski in Melanesia, Victor Segalen in China, and Marcel Griaule in West Africa, the presentation introduces various methods of producing ethnographic knowledge and conducting interviews, highlighting the respective horrors of the desire for knowledge, the asymmetries, and the violence inherent in them, while also revealing the resistance provoked in those being interviewed.

The lecture concludes with Klaus Heinrich’s question regarding the possibilities of a solidarity-based inquiry—an alliance between the questioner and the questioned—that could put a stop to the horrors of the desire for knowledge.

HEIKE BEHREND: Ethnologist; Professor Emerita of Ethnology at the Institute for African and Egyptian Studies at the University of Cologne.

Her areas of expertise include ethnographic research, particularly in East Africa, popular African media culture, and the relationship between religion, war, and violence. She has taught and conducted research at institutions including the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Northwestern University in Evanston [USA], the International Research Center for Cultural Studies [IFK] in Vienna, and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Japan.

In her 2020 retrospective on nearly 50 years of research practice, *The Humanization of a Monkey: An Autobiography of Ethnographic Research*, she reverses the colonial gaze and recognizes herself as an object of ethnography through the eyes of those being studied. The book was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2021 in the “Nonfiction and Essays” category. Her latest work is titled “Conversations with a Dead Man: Gustaf Nagel, Prophet of Arendsee” [2025].

Overview of the lecture series

“Thou shalt, thou shalt not. Prohibitions and Commandments between Religion, Law, and Politics”

Prohibitions and commandments are at the heart of religious and ethical conduct, stabilizing social orders, protecting against violence, and limiting the abuse of power. Rights, including fundamental rights, are secured through prohibitions. At the same time, prohibitions themselves are an expression of political, economic, and social power relations.

Prohibiting others—or even oneself—from doing something means restricting freedom of action and self-realization. The fact that this repressive function of prohibitions and taboos has an inherent culture-forming dimension is what accounts for the unease that Sigmund Freud already attributed to culture at the beginning of the 20th century. The productive power of prohibitions can also be traced etymologically: as far back as Old Low German, the verb “to prohibit” [mnd. vorbēden] was closely related to the command, in the sense of an emphatic directive for action.

In the summer semester of 2026, the Mosse Lectures aim to shed light on the ambivalences of prohibitions from a historical and systematic perspective and to examine their relevance to contemporary social debates. For while criticism of prohibitions has seemed ubiquitous in many social spheres for some time now, and “breaking taboos” carries positive connotations for good reasons, prohibitions are experiencing a renaissance in contexts where they become instruments of crisis management. For instance, in the global discussions surrounding the necessity and legitimacy of a social media ban for children and adolescents. Or in current climate policy, which, under the banner of securing intertemporal freedom, faces the task of readjusting the relationship between intergenerational justice and “prohibition culture” and discussing a current imperative for bans. Debates surrounding cancel culture, fake news, and digital personality rights also revolve around possibilities for prohibitive restrictions.

The Mosse Lectures bring together perspectives from philosophy, cultural studies, ethnology, and law to examine the conditions under which bans appear legitimate, their cultural prerequisites and political functions, and, not least, the power that is constituted in the act of banning.

Further events in this series:

– Adrian Daub: “‘Still,’ ‘No Longer,’ ‘Finally Again’: Collective Perception of Time and Discourses on Prohibition” | Thu, June 4, 2026

– Jule Govrin: “Forbidden Bodies? Democratic Care and Bodily Self-Determination in Times of Authoritarian Austerity” | Thu, July 2, 2026

– Sabine Müller-Mall: “Future Freedom and the Presence of Prohibition” | Thu, July 9, 2026