The history about the first European Center of Excellence for Social and Cultural Anthropology

Historical Background of the first European Center of Excellence for Social and Cultural Anthropolgy

In the year 2004 a small group of Social and Cultural Anthropology students met in Vienna to dicuss new anthropological approaches. During this meeting the need and the mutual vision to involve new ideas and perspecitves into the societal debate was expressed in order to create opportunities to communicate anthropological and culture-sensitive knowledge beyond national and universitarian boundaries.

As a result of this meeting the international Moving Anthropology Student Network was founded. Today this network is connecting more than 1100 Anthropologists from more than 60 countries. The network is considered to be an open platform following the bottom up approach. The homepage and a newsgroup are forming a virtuell connection tool and are providing an open discussion and information forum to its members. To encourage face-to-face contacts among the members an international conference is organised in a different country each year. The previous conferences (2005 in Austria, 2006 in Croatia, 2007 in Poland and in Germany, 2008 Italy) were attended by more than 300 Students from 15 different countries.

The first international Conference “Connecting Europe – Transcending Borders” in the year 2005 provided enough incentive for the Austrian organizers to found MASN-Austria the first European Center of Excellence (Kompetenzzentrum) for Social and Cultural Anthropology.