The Yakut

Michael Dürr (Hrsg.)

Michael Dürr is an anthropological linguist specializing in Mesoamerica and the North Pacific Rim. He works as a librarian in Berlin and also teaches anthropology and Mayan languages at the Free University of Berlin. His publications include studies on Franz Boas's text collections for the languages Sm'algyax and Kwak'wala of the northwest coast. He also co-authored an introduction to descriptive linguistics (in German) and participates in the language preservation and publishing activities of the Kulturstiftung Sibirien. Currently he is focusing on an edition of 16th to 18th century dictionaries and grammars in K'iche' and Mixtec.

Erich Kasten (Hrsg.)

Erich Kasten studied social and cultural anthropology and taught at the Free University of Berlin. He has conducted extensive field research in the Canadian Pacific Northwest and in Kamchatka and has curated international museum exhibitions. As the first coordinator of the Siberian research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, he studied transformations in Post-Soviet Siberia. In ensuing projects for UNESCO and the National Science Foundation, he documented and analyzed indigenous knowledge. Since 2010 he has been the director of the Foundation for Siberian Cultures in Fürstenberg/Havel (Germany). More recently he has also applied himself to developing web archives and Internet interfaces with the purpose of enhancing access and sustaining endangered cultural heritage.