Ute Röschenthaler

Dr. Ute Röschenthaler is an anthropologist. Her research fields include cultural mobility, economic anthropology and trade networks in the Global South.

Ute Röschenthaler had research projects on the history of cult associations and cultural performances in southwest Cameroon and southeast Nigeria since 1987 and on product histories in Mali since 2005, especially the history of Chinese green tea and its commodity trail from China to Mali. She was a member of the cluster of excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt, in which she worked on media and intellectual property in African countries (2008-2017). She was also a member in the project “Africa’s Asian Options” (AFRASO) at Goethe University Frankfurt, with a project on trade networks of Africans in China and Malaysia (2013-2017).

Since 2014 she is an extracurricular professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. She was a Senior Fellow of the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften at Vienna (Oct. 2019- Jan. 2020). In 2019 she curated an exhibition “Ataya – Chinesischer Grüntee in Mali” with a group of students at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She also has an online-tea museum www.virtualgreenteamuseum.de.

As a visiting research fellow at the ASCL she works on a book project on Malian tea importers and their brands, and she will start with another book project on African trade networks. She will also present her work in a seminar.

Keywords: Cultural mobility, trade networks in the Global South, African entrepreneurship, economic anthropology, product histories, media studies, intellectual property.