Bio Note: Martin Staude is a Ph.D. student in sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Having grown up in East Germany and with the high school diploma in the bag, I set off for the UK and USA to work and study. This traveling and the Castaneda books got me interested in other cultures and languages. So I began to study social anthropology and economics at the Freie Universität Berlin. My areas of interest were economic practices and structures in different societies as well as development processes and foreign aid, but also questions of methodology and epistemology. Field research and internships took me to Mexico, Senegal, Venezuela, and France – and sometimes to the hospital. The title of my M.A. thesis was Coffee Production and Commercialization: Decision Making among Indigenous Peasants and Rural Merchants in Oaxaca, Mexico. Working on my Ph.D. thesis, I became fascinated with sociology, linguistics, and semiotics, which revealed new worlds to me. The working title of my Ph.D. thesis is Meanings and Meaning Fields: A Theoretical Outline from Semio-linguistic Sociology Through the Example of Power and Law.

Affiliation: Independent Researcher