Welcome to the website of the Anthropologist and Photographer Alban von Stockhausen.
Please visit the different sections of the site, to find out about my work as an anthropologist and photographer in the Greater Himalayan Region. Most of my current and past research and exhibition projects were focussed on the Naga tribes of Northeast India and Burma, the Shamanistic cultures of Eastern Nepal and the topic of Visual Anthropology. For details, please check out my CV and the list of selected publications in the ‘About’ section. If you are interested in my work as a photographer and my photographic archive, please visit the ‘Photography‘ section of the website.
I’m currently based in Vienna (Austria), where I work and live together with my wife, the Anthropologist Marion Wettstein and our daughter Anaïs.
Nepal: Ritual Space Mimesis
In my current project titled "Ritual and Space: Identity based on Ritual Landscape among the Rai of Eastern Nepal", the main research question is concerned with ritual landscapes and territories as perceived by the Rai communities. In what ways are they defined as a sacred topography in myth and ritual? And how are they used in the formation of contemporary identities?
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1930's Naga Photography
My project on historical photographs of the Naga is based on two photographic collections, assembled by the anthropologists Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf and Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann who both travelled among the Naga during the 1930's. It focuses on Kauffmann's work which was largely unknown until I discovered the original photographic films in an German archive.
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Photography Archive
During my various research activities in the Greater Himalyan Region, I built up a large and extensively documented photographic archive and database. It focuses on the Naga cultures of Northeast India and the Kirat Rai of Eastern Nepal and includes materials to topics ranging from shamanistic rituals to fashion shows, from material culture to current politics and questions of modernity.
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