Sensing Loss – Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

Donnerstags 16:30-17:30Uhr 

Fabian Lüke, MA (Köln): Loss, Return, Re-Integration? Moravian Mission Heritage and Lived Religion in District Six, Cape Town 

As an urban space marked by histories of forced removals, Cape Town’s District Six has been the subject of and stage for ongoing political, legal, and social struggles over restorative justice in post-apartheid South Africa. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2024 with members of the Moravian Church (MCSA), this contribution examines how the ‘new’ Moravian Hill congregation in District Six engages in the re-making of its chapel as a religious heritage site, and how congregants sense and make sense of past and present experiences of loss through religious registers rooted in eighteenth-century Pietism.

I therefore take a closer look at the local tradition of Moravian house blessings against the background of land restitution, urban redevelopment, and the return of formerly displaced residents to District Six. Following Ernesto de Martino’s notion of religious re-integration (1956/2012), I show how the practice of house blessing restructures relationships between people, spaces, and different temporalities, by creating a relational topography within the religious intimacy of the Moravian Hill congregation.

Moravian actors mobilize tangible and intangible manifestations of “Moravian Mission Heritage” to navigate experiences of loss and articulate senses of past, present, and future belonging in District Six. In this process, the re-making of the congregation and its church becomes a way of negotiating return in a contested urban space where the hopes and expectations of returnees encounter the complex realities and ambiguities of contemporary District Six.

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Die Diskussionsreihe Sensing Loss bringt ethnologische Forschungen aus der Universität ins Museum. Sozial- und Kulturanthropolog:innen aller Karrierestufen berichten aus ihren aktuellen Forschungen, wie Menschen Verlust erfahren und Verlusterfahrungen bearbeiten. Sensing Loss fragt, wie Verlust begegnet, verkörpert und verräumlicht wird – und wie aus Vertreibung, Enteignung und vergangenem Unrecht neue Zukünfte gewonnen werden können. Erfahrungen des Verlusts (loss), ihre Konfrontation und Aufarbeitung [r e t u r n] sind dabei so vielfältig wie die Situationen, in denen Menschen Kolonialismus, Marginalisierung oder Gewalt begegnen. Die öffentlichen Vorträge diskutieren Formen des Sensing, über die Menschen Verlust gewahr werden, und Sense Making, d.h. die Frage, wie Menschen Verlusterfahrungen eine Bedeutung verleihen. Trauer, Verlust und Erinnerung können zur Quelle werden, Ansprüche an die Gegenwart zu artikulieren und zwischen Menschen und Orten, Vergangenheit und Zukunft neue Verbindungen zu erarbeiten. Im Sinne der Ausstellung r e t u r n  beschäftigen sich die Vorträge mit ganz unterschiedlichen Momenten und Formen der Trauer, der Nostalgie, der Erinnerungsarbeit und des gemeinsamen Aufbruchs. 

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The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.