Jeanne Berrenberg

Jeanne Berrenberg was a German cultural anthropologist.

Berrenberg was born in Mainz in 1963. She trained in the textile industry. After years of living abroad (especially in Indonesia), she earned her high school diploma at night school and began studying ethnology and ancient American studies at Freie Universität Berlin in 1996. In 2003, she received the Rudolf Virchow Förderpreis of the Berlin Anthropological Society for her thesis. In 2006, she completed her doctorate in anthropology on Islamic Sufism and worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology. She was also active in teaching there. One focus of her work was cultures of Pakistan. Increasingly, however, she withdrew from academia. She died by suicide in Berlin in 2014 after years of physical and mental illness. She was single and childless throughout her life. Since no relatives or friends could be found to organize the funeral, Berrenberg was buried by the state.

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