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Die Wölfe kehren zurück nach Deutschland - und mit ihnen auch die Konflikte zwischen Mensch und Wolf. Eine zentrale Rolle spielen dabei die Affekte, Atmosphären, Gefühle und Stimmungen, die ihre Rückkehr auslöst. Mit ethnografischen Mitteln untersucht Thorsten Gieser die komplexe Verflechtung von Natur und Gesellschaft im Anthropozän. Seine These: Die Wölfe bewegen und berühren uns in einer gemeinsamen Lebenswelt und stoßen damit einen Prozess an, uns als mehr-als-menschliche Gesellschaft neu zu denken. Er zeigt Wege zu einem konstruktiven Umgang mit Affekten auf, schlägt ein komplexes Verständnis von Wölfen als affektive Akteure vor und begreift somit das Mensch-Wolf-Verhältnis radikal neu.

Die Wölfe kehren zurück nach Deutschland - und mit ihnen auch die Konflikte zwischen Mensch und Wolf. Eine zentrale Rolle spielen dabei die Affekte, Atmosphären, Gefühle und Stimmungen, die ihre Rückkehr auslöst. Mit ethnografischen Mitteln untersucht Thorsten Gieser die komplexe Verflechtung von Natur und Gesellschaft im Anthropozän. Seine These: Die Wölfe bewegen und berühren uns in einer gemeinsamen Lebenswelt und stoßen damit einen Prozess an, uns als mehr-als-menschliche Gesellschaft neu zu denken. Er zeigt Wege zu einem konstruktiven Umgang mit Affekten auf, schlägt ein komplexes Verständnis von Wölfen als affektive Akteure vor und begreift somit das Mensch-Wolf-Verhältnis radikal neu.

In this article I offer a sensory exploration of hunting landscapes in contemporary Germany. In a first step, I show how such landscapes are built on and materially structured as cultural landscapes through hunting practices. In the remainder of the article, I examine more specifically how hunters perceive this landscape while being engaged in hunting and looking for game animals. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, I describe not only what "objects" hunters single out in this landscape as relevant for their practice. More importantly, I extend perception from a mere "object recognition" to the skilled sensing of perceptual Gestalt relations in the landscape, guided by embodied sensations. Hunters' perception conceived this way thus becomes an atmospheric practice within the meshwork of a whole elemental weatherworld. I conclude by showing how a phenomenological understanding of hunters' perception might help ethnographers to open up new horizons of more-than-human worlds.

Horticulture – like many other traditional crafts in Britain – is said to suffer from a 'skills problem'. A recent survey suggests that one of the reasons for this is increased outsourcing of horticultural work from public employers to private contractors. While anthropologists have generally acknowledged the politics of learning, they have had little to say about enskillment in work contexts which have been reconfigured in a way that leaves hardly any room for institutionalized methods of learning. Private gardening contractors are an example of such a work context, and in this article I scrutinize their practices to show the various ways in which enskillment is inhibited. Rather than referring to the concept of 'deskilling' – usually evoked in discussions of skills problems – I employ the notion of an inhibition of enskillment in order to emphasize that every feature that fosters skill also has a 'shadow side' to it which bears a potential to inhibit skill. Implicit in this argument is a critique of neoliberal work practices which shape enskillment as well as the natural environment.

"In a boundary crossing and globalizing world, the personal and social positions in self and identity become increasingly dense, heterogeneous and even conflicting. In this Handbook scholars of different disciplines, nations and cultures (East and West) bring together their views and applications of Dialogical Self Theory in such a way that deeper commonalities are brought to the surface. As a 'bridging theory', Dialogical Self Theory reveals unexpected links between a broad variety of phenomena, such as self and identity problems in education and psychotherapy, multicultural identities, child-rearing practices, adult development, consumer behaviour, the use of internet and the value of silence. Researchers and practitioners present different methods of investigation, both qualitative and quantitative, and also highlight applications of Dialogical Self Theory"--