Biographical note

Axel Michaels is Senior Professor of Classical Indology at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany. Since 2006, he is Vice President of the Heidelberg Academy of Science and head of the project ‘Religious and Legal Documents of Pre-modern Nepal’. His research interests include social history and history of Hinduism, theory of rituals, life cycle rites of passage in Nepal as well as the cultural and legal history of Nepal. He is the author of Homo ritualis. Hindu Rituals and its Significance for Ritual Theory (2016); Hinduism. Past and Present (2004); Śiva in Trouble. Rituals and Festivals at the Paśupatinātha temple of Deopatan, Nepal (2008); and Kultur und Geschichte Nepals (2018).

Christoph Wulf is Professor of Anthropology and Education at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He is also a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Historical Anthropology, the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB, 1999-2012), and the Graduate School ‘InterArts’ at the Freie Universität Berlin. His books have been translated into 20 languages. He is Vice-President of the German Commission for UNESCO. His research interests include historical and cultural anthropology, educational anthropology, rituals, gestures, imagination, intercultural communication and aesthetics. He has authored and edited various books including (with G. Gebauer) Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society (1995); Anthropology. A Continental Perspective (2013); Human Beings and their Images. Imagination, Mimesis, Imaginary (German edition 2014; English edition in preparation); Exploring Alterity in a Globalized World (2016); (with J. R. Resina) Repetition, Recurrence, Returns: How Cultural Renewal works (2019); and Bildung als Wissen vom Menschen im Anthropozän (2020; English edition in preparation).