My research interests are mainly connected to the anthropology of Religion and questions of caste and class, with a focus on Hindu traditions, ritual theory, atheism, secularity, and nonreligion. One of my primary objectives is to examine not only the diversity of religious life, but also the diversity of positions that do not conform to dominant religio-social norms and normativities. To do so, I ventured into the fields of existential anthropology and the anthropology of ethics, which allows me to explore issues of religion and secularity through different lenses.
I have also researched and published in the field of medical anthropology, with a focus on therapeutic pluralism and mental health. Here, I investigated how people navigate between different therapeutic traditions, particularly between healing temples and psychiatry in India.
Methodologically, I combine ethnographic and biographical research techniques. This enables me to address different temporalities and modalities of knowledge, to do justice to the co-constitutive relationship between individual and society, to tackle the micro-sociological messiness of life and larger socio-historical forces simultaneously, and to interrelate the existential and quotidian questions that together shape people’s lives.
Other parts of my work engaged with the history of knowledge and with asymmetrical research structures in combination with "team research".

South Asia, in particular North India; Europe, especially Germany and Switzerland

Johannes Quack is an associate professor of Social Anthropology. He studied religious studies, social anthropology and philosophy at the universities in Bayreuth, Edinburgh and Heidelberg (receiving his PhD in 2009).

Quack’s main publications include Disenchanting India: Organized Rationalism and Criticism of Religion in India (OUP, New York 2012), The Problem of Ritual Efficacy (OUP, New York 2010), Religion und Kritik in der Moderne (LIT, Münster 2012), Asymmetrical Conversations: Contestations, Circumventions and the Blurring of Therapeutic Boundaries (Berghahn, New York 2014), Religious Indifference: New Perspectives From Studies on Secularization and Non-religion (Springer, Berlin 2017) and The Diversity of Nonreligion: Contested Normativities and Relations (Routledge, Abingdon 2020).

Quack is a member of the European Research Council (ERC) project “Religion and its Others in South Asia and the World: Communities, Debates, Freedoms”, member of the Centre for the History of Knowledge (Zentrum Geschichte des Wissens), the founder of the South Asia Forum (SAF), co-publisher of the book series Religion and Its Others: Studies in Religion, Non-religion, and Secularity (De Gruyter), and co-director of the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network (NSRN).

Furthermore, Quack was a research fellow at the DFG Kolleg-Forschergruppe Multiple Secularities at the University of Leipzig, the speaker for the research field Entangled Histories of the ‘University Research Priority Program’ (URPP) Asia and Europe at the University of Zurich, a member of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe’ at the University of Heidelberg, research fellow at McGill University, Montreal, the director of the Emmy Noether project ‘The Diversity of Nonreligion’ at the University of Frankfurt, a research Fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study (JNIAS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a guest faculty member at the Charles University in Prague, a visiting fellow at the Max Weber College in Erfurt, a member of the Indian-European Research Networking Program in the Social Sciences ‘Advances in Research on Globally Accessible Medicine’ (AROGYAM), and a visiting professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS) at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).

Current and completed research projects are listed here.

Office hours on Thursdays between 1:15 p.m. and 2:30 p.m.: Book an appointment.