Johannes Fabian

Johannes Fabian (born 19 May 1937) is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. In 1956 Fabian went to Bonn to continue his studies, and then moved on St. Gabriel, Mödling. He studied anthropology there and in Munich and at the University of Chicago. He took up appointments at a series of universities; in 1968 at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; in 1973 at the University of Zaire; in 1974 at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut; in 1980 at the University of Amsterdam; and had visiting appointments at Bonn, Cologne, and Paris. His field research focuses on religious movements in Zaire and Congo. Fabian wrote various critical books but his most famous is Time and the Other (1983), a classic in the field of anthropology that had changed the way that anthropologists "make their object." As the blurbs on the book put it, the book is "a radical epistemological critique of anthropological writing" (George Marcus, University of California, Irvine) and "Time and the Other is a critique of the notions that anthropologists are 'here and now,' their objects of study are 'there and then,' and that the 'other' exists in a time not contemporary with our own." His 1996 work, Remembering the Present: Paintings and popular history in Zaire was made in collaboration with the Congolese artist Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu.

Early life

Johannes Fabian was born in the German town of Glogau (which is now in Poland).