Mai 2025

Bettina Beer received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Hamburg, in 1995, with a dissertation on German-Philippine marriages. Interethnic marriages and the migration of women. She habilitated in 2001 with a project on Body concepts, interethnic relations and theories of racism. She has conducted long-term fieldwork in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, and research on cultural diversity in German-speaking Europe. She is committed to the importance of the connection between research and teaching in all aspects of anthropology.

She received the Siemers-Preis of Hamburg University, and later a Heisenberg fellowship from the German Research Foundation. In 2003, she was elected a member of the Young Academy (of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science), and in 2006 became full professor of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Heidelberg. Since 2008 she has been professor for social and cultural anthropology at the University of Lucerne; in 2011, was elected to the Leibniz Chair at the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Ecology, Bremen. She is co-editor of the journal Sociologus.

Her current research project is focused on ruptures in intimate relations and conceptual questions in the anthropology of kinship; it is informed by empirical research on separation and the annulment of marriages in the Philippines.