Prof. Dr. Matthias Krings
CEDITRAA Co-Speaker,
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Matthias Krings is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He has specialized in the study of African popular culture, media and visual anthropology, the anthropology of the body, and religion. Currently he is interested in the craft of East African video jockeys who appropriate foreign films by remediating them through oral narrative performances. His latest book, African Appropriations: Cultural Difference, Mimesis, and Media, was published by Indiana University Press. He has done extensive fieldwork in Nigeria and Tanzania.
Matthias Krings primarily contributes to the work in Working Area A: Forms, Formats and Contents, in Working Area B: Legal and Institutional Frameworks and in Project 2.1. on Digital Transformation and Formal Innovation in the Nigerian Music Industry.
My CEDITRAA story
“How important social media have become for African cultural entrepreneurs dawned on me during a visit to Lagos in 2019. I was chatting with a popular Nigerian musician and some of his friends in the office of their digital start-up. Suddenly, someone suggested that the woman who would become the company’s CEO had to work on her ‘brand’. At first, I didn’t understand, but when they eventually began to improvise a photo shooting that would provide her with Instagram-able pictures, it suddenly dawned on me: her digital self needed some polishing, which was meant to rub-off on the identity of the start-up and its yet to be developed services. I had witnessed entrepreneurial identity-work in the making.”