Ramstedt, Martin

Martin Ramstedt is currently extraordinary professor at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, research partner of the Law and Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, and until September 2024 member of the governing board of the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law. In September 2022, he finished his term of office as Scientific Director of the Oñati International Institute for Sociology of Law, Research Professor of Ikerbasque/Basque Foundation for Science and Temporary Distinguished Professor in the Law Faculty of the University of the Basque Country in San Sebastián/Donostia. Prior to his academic appointment in the Autonomous Basque Community in Spain, he was Deputy Professor ("Vertretungsprofessor") for Social and Cultural Anthropology and Comparative Cultural Sociology at the Institute for Ethnology and Philosophy, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Sep. 2017 - August 2019), where he had since 2015, the year of his habilitation, taught as private lecturer. Throughout his career he taught at various Dutch, German, Spanish and Indonesian universities in the areas of his expertise. For twenty years, Ramstedt worked at several international research institutions: as European Science Foundation research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden as well as the Nordic Institute for Asian Studies in Copenhagen (Oct. 1997 - March 2001), as researcher at the Meertens Institute (a Royal Netherlands Academy of the Arts and Sciences institute for Dutch Ethnology) in Amsterdam (Oct. 2001 - Sep. 2006), as senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Oct. 2006 - March 2014), where he continued as an associated researcher until 2020, as research fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Studies "Law as Culture" (April 2014 - March 2015) and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Linguistics and Caribbean Studies/KITLV Leiden (June - August 2015), and as senior research fellow at the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies "Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, beyond Modernities" in Leipzig (April 2016 - March 2017). Ramstedt has done extensive research, taught and widely published on topics at the intersection of Law, Religion and Politics in different Indonesian and Indian colonial and postcolonial settings, as well as on Normative and Legal Pluralism, including the Mediation and Restorative Justice movement, from a theoretic and comparative perspective, and is currently developing a constructivist and cosmopolitanist inquiry into the formation of norms/normativity in the context of global legal/normative pluralism. He also did research in the Netherlands and in the Basque Country. He is chief editor of the book series "Religion and Society in Asia" at Amsterdam University Press, review editor of Frontiers in Sociology – Sociology of Law, member of the editorial board of the online journal "Oñati Socio-Legal Series", global coordinator for anthropological and postcolonial approaches in the Global Access to Justice Project, and a mediator licensed with the Bundesverband Mediation e.V. (i.e., German professional association of mediators).