David Berliner (anthropologist)
David Berliner (born 16 February 1976) is a Belgian anthropologist and a professor of anthropology at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Academic career Born in Brussels, Berliner holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Brussels (2002) and has been a doctoral visiting student at The University of Manchester and Oxford University. From 2001 to 2003, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, and has taught at the Central European University, formerly based in Budapest (Hungary). Between 2011 and 2015, he was coeditor of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, the journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He has held invited professorships at Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (in 2017) and at Université de Toulouse II – Le Mirail (in 2010). He mostly writes about memory, nostalgia (exonostalgia)., temporality, heritage, transmission and cultural loss, but also religion, gender and sexuality. Influenced by Lévi-Strauss, William James, Georges Perec and Donna Haraway, he pursues the project of an anthropology rooted in solid, “thick” empiricism and balancing smoothly between hermeneutical understanding and scientific modes of explanation; an anthropology that is capable of accounting for the ways individuals “arrive at” cultural concepts, representations, practices and emotions. This implies an intellectual commitment