Erich Kolig

Erich Kolig is an Austrian–New Zealand cultural and social anthropologist whose research has focussed on Muslim and Islamic social and religious issues, and Australian Aboriginal culture. He has written and edited 13 books, as well as publishing many scientific papers and book chapters.

Biography Kolig read social, cultural and physical anthropology, philosophy, psychology and medicine at the University of Vienna, gaining a PhD in 1969 with a thesis on the body-soul conceptions among New Guinea Papuans, using the methodology of ethnoscience. In 1968 he performed his first field work in Afghanistan as a graduate student, studying matters of Islamic and Muslim society.

In 1970, Kolig shifted his focus to the Kimberley region of Western Australia. with a research fellowship at the University of Western Australia, sponsored by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra. This focus was on religious change, and this led to his first book, The Silent Revolution: The Effects of Modernisation on Australian Aboriginal Religion (1981). He acted as consultant to the WA Housing Commission, to mining companies (to map sacred sites and advise on their preservation) and to the West Australian Attorney General's Office and the Premier's Office in matters of native title claims (Aboriginal land rights).

Kolig's subsequent interests included the Pacific region, particularly Vanuatu where he studied charismatic movements). In the 1990s his interests turned to Islamic matters and the study of Muslim society, which linked back to his first field work in Afghanistan in 1969. He became interested in radical Islam in Indonesia and in multicultural situations in which Muslims constitute a minority, and undertook research in New Zealand, Indonesia and Austria to gather material for several books and numerous chapters and articles, and also drew on his travel experience in the Middle East and North Africa. Based on intensive research he produced the first comprehensive study of the New Zealand Muslim community in New Zealand’s Muslims and Multiculturalism in book form. After retirement he continued with Muslim studies as an Honorary Fellow in Religion at Otago University until 2017. Kolig's work after retirement focusses on the connection of culture and globalisation, culture politics in general, and a global comparative exercise of cultural phenomena.

Kolig has also had a vital interest in museum culture. Apart from several periods in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin in Dahlem, he also made collections of Hindukush arts and crafts and Aboriginal art from the Australian Kimberleys (both collections are in the Ethnological Museum in Vienna) and a collection of Vanuatu traditional pottery from the village of Wusi on Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu (in the Otago Museum in Dunedin, New Zealand).

Personal life Kolig has Austrian and New Zealand citizenship. He lives on a small farm on the outskirts of Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand.