Publications

Publications

Material Culture in Transit. Theory and Practice

As the first in the Book Series, Routledge Studies in Anthropology and Museums, Material Culture in Transit Theory and Practice
constellates curators and scholars actively working with material culture within academic and museal institutions through theory and practice. The rich collection of essays critically addresses the multivalent ways in which mobility reshapes the　characteristics of artefacts, specifically under prevailing issues of representation and colonial liabilities. The volume attests to material culture as central to understanding the repercussions of problematic histories and proposes novel ways to address them. It offers valuable reading for scholars of anthropology, museum studies, history and others with interest in material culture.

Sawt, Bodies, Species. Sonic Pluralism in Morocco von Gilles Aubry

Die Dissertation von Gilles Aubry «Sonic Pluralism. An Artistic Research on Postcolonial Aurality, Embodiment, and Ecological Voices in Morocco” (betreut von Prof. Dr. Michaela Schäuble) ist in Buchform mit dem Titel Sawt, Bodies, Species. Sonic Pluralism in Morocco (open access) erschienen

Drylands Facing Change: Interventions, Investments and Identities

London: Routledge,Taylor & Francis. Kronenburg Garcia, A. K., Haller, T., van Dijk, H., Samimi, C., & Warner, J. (Eds.). (2022).
This open access edited volume is the result of the EU COST Action Drylands Facing Change that involved Tobias Haller as work package leader. It examines the changes that arise from the entanglement of global interests and narratives with the local struggles that have always existed in the drylands of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia/Inner Asia.The chapters discuss global land rush and commons grabbing, historical expansion of northern neoliberal orders, urbanization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of violent extremism.

Nollywood-Inspired Migrant Filmmaking in Switzerland: Practice, Performance and Meaning

This book introduces the emerging, but still little-known, phenomenon of Nollywood-inspired filmmaking by African migrants in Europe. Using the unique example of a performance ethnographic case study in Switzerland, it shows how members of the African diaspora represent themselves through audio-visual media and what influence the post-colonial images of the Nigerian video film industry have on their image production.

From earthquake victims to citizens: dependencies and precarious claims on the state in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan

Based on ethnographic research after the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan-controlled Azad Kashmir, this article uses ‘disaster citizenship’ as a conceptual lens focusing on how people renegotiated their relationships with the state in the context of political interventions for reconstruction.

Children of the Crisis. Ethnographic Perspectives on Unaccompanied Refugee Youth In and en Route to Europe

is available with 20% off until 1 May, 2022.

Sanctioning Disciplined Grabs (SDGs): From SDGs as Green Anti-Politics Machine to Radical Alternatives?

The universalist ambition of the 17 Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) and 169 targets as a global plan of action for people, planet, prosperity and peacebuilding deserves analytical scrutiny from multiple angles. While the SDGs are largely heralded as a paradigm shift compared to their predecessor Millennial Development Goals (MDGs), we argue that four fundamental dynamics undermine or severely hamper SDGs as a game changer to address the deep-running sustainability challenges facing the planet.

Balancing the Commons in Switzerland. Institutional Transformations and Sustainable Innovations

Balancing the Commons in Switzerland outlines continuity and change in the management of common-pool resources such as pastures and forests in Switzerland.
The book focuses on the differences and similarities between local institutions (rules and regulations) and forms of commoners’ organisations (corporations of citizens and corporations) which have managed common property for several centuries and have shaped the cultural landscapes of Switzerland. At the core of the book are five case studies from the German, French and Italian speaking regions of Switzerland. Beginning in the Late Middle Ages and focusing on the transformative periods in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it traces the internal and external political, economic and societal changes and examines what impact these changes had on commoners. It goes beyond the work of Robert Netting and Elinor Ostrom, who discussed Swiss commons as a unique case of robustness, by analysing how local commoners reacted to, but also shaped, changes by adapting and transforming common property institutions. Thus, the volume highlights how institutional changes in the management of the commons at the local level are embedded in the public policies of the respective cantons, and the state, which generates a high heterogeneity and an actual laboratory situation. It shows the power relations and very different routes that local collective organisations and their members have followed in order to cope with the loss of value of the commons and the increased workload for maintaining common property management. Providing insightful case studies of commons management, this volume delivers theoretical contributions and lessons to be learned for the commons worldwide.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the commons, natural resource management and agricultural development.

The Kurdish Women's Freedom Movement. Gender, Body Politics and Militant Femininities

Amidst ongoing wars and insecurities, female fighters, politicians and activists of the Kurdish Freedom Movement are building a new political system that centres gender equality. Since the Rojava Revolution, the international focus has been especially on female fighters, a gaze that has often been essentialising and objectifying, brushing over a much more complex history of violence and resistance. Going beyond Orientalist tropes of the female freedom fighter, and the movement's own narrative of the 'free woman', Isabel Käser looks at personal trajectories and everyday processes of becoming a militant in this movement. Based on in-depth ethnographic research in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, with women politicians, martyr mothers and female fighters, she looks at how norms around gender and sexuality have been rewritten and how new meanings and practices have been assigned to women in the quest for Kurdish self-determination. Her book complicates prevailing notions of gender and war and creates a more nuanced understanding of the everyday embodied epistemologies of violence, conflict and resistance.

Working for Protection? Precarious Legal Inclusion of Afghan Nationals in Germany and Switzerland

This paper engages with the violent conditions deriving from neoliberal trends in European migration and asylum governance. Anna Wyss and Carolin Fischer explore how continuous precarity, in conjunction with an integration imperative, affects the lives of recently arrived Afghan refugees in Germany and Switzerland.

«Studies in the Arts – Neue Perspektiven auf Forschung über, in und durch Kunst und Design»

herausgegeben von Thomas Gartmann und Michaela Schäuble. U.a. mit einem Aufsatz von Prof. Heinzpeter Znoj. Open Access!

Balancing the Commons in Switzerland

Does Commons Grabbing Lead to Resilience Grabbing? The Anti-Politics Machine of Neo-Liberal Development and Local Responses

Open Access

Knowing Women. Same-Sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana

Neofaschismus in Italien. Politik, Familie und Religion in Rom. Eine Ethnographie

Towards Shared Research

Soundscapes of the return. Palm oil, dispossession and cultures of peace in post-conflict Colombia.

This book presents an innovative analysis of the land conflicts arising from large-scale oil palm plantations in Colombia. The study reveals the powerful political dimension of music in the context of the post-conflict that the Colombian country is going through and investigates the local impact of oil palm monocultures in rural areas of Colombia. The research examines strategies, mechanisms and peace-building actions initiated by the forced displaced rural communities to return to their land.
Based on three case studies of communities on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Colombia and the compilation of almost forty unpublished songs - most of them in Vallenato rhythm - composed by the peasant communities, the book brings together the musical productions that have emerged in this context and offers a detailed analysis from within and about rural community processes, examining the role of community culture in conflict transformation.

The Bureaucratic Production of Difference. Ethos and Ethics in Migration Administrations

In the context of the ever-increasing political problematization of migration in Europe, agencies charged with migrant administration create diverse categories of difference to distinguish between the »deserving migrant« and the illegal one: They assess the detainability or the credibility of asylum seekers, the danger posed by Islamic organizations, and make situational decisions that determine whether migration or labour law applies to individual agricultural workers. In this book, each chapter analyses how organizational interpretations of the common good shape bureaucratic practices. Together, these ethnographic analyses reveal how migration policies in different European countries take shape in administrative practice.

Alltag nach dem Erdbeben. Eine politische Ethnografie des Wiederaufbaus in Azad Kaschmir, Pakistan

Schild, Pascale 2019. Bielefeld: transcript.

Measuring Justice

Published Dissertation: Measuring Justice. Quantitative Accountability and the National Prosecuting Authority in South Africa

The Commons in a Glocal World: Global Connections and Local Responses

Urban Dreams. Transformations of Family Life in Burkina Faso

written by our collegue Claudia Roth†

Being-Here. Placemaking in a World of Movement

Until the end of July 2018, the book can be purchased for a discounted prize (50%). Simply enter the code LEM496 at the checkout

Hope. Flight to Europe, surrogate motherhood in Russia, organ donation in Germany: wishes and hopes from an artistic, scientific and literary viewpoint.

With photographs by Sarah Hildebrand and essays by social anthropologists Gerhild Perl, Julia Rehsmann and Veronika Siegl

The Open Cut

Mining, Transnational Corporations and Local Populations
Reihe: Action Anthropology/Aktionsethnologie

Fragmentation of Natural Resources Management

Lit-Verlag

Localising moralities: power and temporality in Southeastern Europe

Anders Wirtschaften – Gespräche mit Leuten, die es versuchen

Conzett Verlag

The World of Indicators The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification

Cambridge

NARRATING VICTIMHOOD Gender, Religion and the Making of Place in Post-War Croatia

Now available as paperback

The ContestedFloodplain.

Institutional Change of the Commons in the Kafue Flats, Zambia, Lanham: Lexington/Rowman&Littlefield. (2013) (with a foreword by Elizabeth Colson)

Civil disobedience and climate trials in Switzerland

Im Rahmen unseres SNF Projektes haben wir in Zusammenarbeit mit humanrights.ch (eine NGO mit Sitz in Bern) einen Bericht zu zivilem Ungehorsam und Klimaprozessen in der Schweiz veröffentlicht.

Beyond politics: in/civilities of ‘non-political’ peacebuilding for Kashmir

Drawing on ethnographic research among peace workers and their local partners, this article traces the politics of civil society peacebuilding for Kashmir at a time when both state violence in Kashmir and local and transnational resistance and activism for Kashmiris’ right to political self-determination have intensified. It uses ‘civility’ as an analytical lens focusing on the ambivalence of claims about taking a restrained and ‘non-political’ stance in the violent conflicts over territorial sovereignty in Kashmir. While ‘non-political’ peacebuilding brings people together across social and political divides and makes it possible to imagine alternatives for Kashmir’s future beyond territorial sovereignty, it is also deeply entrenched in conflictual processes of exclusion. The claims to civility draw moral and political boundaries that incite violence and radical disagreement among people and groups – as civil society and political activists or militants.

Securing conservation Lebensraum? The geo-, bio-, and ontopolitics of global conservation futures

Revisiting Ratzelian and other fin de siècle theorizations of Lebensraum, Jevgeniy Bluwstein, Connor Cavanagh and Rob Fletcher show how contemporary efforts to reformulate conservation governance at the planetary scale risk amounting to a what they call “conservation Lebensraum”, or a globally-significant “struggle for conservation space”.

Analysing the implications of conservation Lebensraum through a conceptual framework at the intersection of conservation biopolitics, geopolitics, and ontopolitics, the article highlights how global biodiversity conservation initiatives seek to respond to multiple socio-ecological crises in the so-called Anthropocene.

Resetting the forestry commons: Constitutionality as a conflict resolution strategy in African woodlands

This paper comparatively analyses three case studies in Mali, Senegal and Tanzania regarding institutions for forest commons, their grabbing during colonial and post-colonial times and local reactions. It shows how local new bottom-up institutions were build and how integrating gender and marginal groups dimensions could work in the constitutionality framework. In the cases of Mali and Senegal these constitutionality processes for managing the forest resources reduced conflicts, while in Tanzania, women had largely been left out in land deal negotiations and institution-building about the acquired land. The paper fills the gap on gender and intersectionality in constitutionality studies.

Swiss Academies Factsheet: The New Global Connect: Mega-Infrastructure Projects and Their Local Impacts

Smart Complaints? ‘Wild’ Things and the Promise of (Un)happiness in Urban Crowdsourcing Apps

uniFOKUS: Speisetabus - die kulturelle Konstruktion des Ekels

Warum funktionieren Tauschmittel? Der gesellschaftliche Rahmen des Geldes

SAGW Bulletin 3/22: Geld: seine Werte, seine Wandlungen

Ein Winter ohne Zentralheizung und Funktionskleidung?

Ambivalences of Un/Deservingness: Tracing Vulnerability in the EU Border Regime.

Strasser, S. (2022). Ambivalences of Un/Deservingness: Tracing Vulnerability in the EU Border Regime. In J. Tošić & A. Streinzer (Eds.), Deservingness – Reassessing the Moral Dimensions of Inequality (Vol. 45, pp. 251-277). New York, Oxford: Berghahn.

From commons to resilience grabbing: Insights from historically-oriented social anthropological research on African peasants

«Die SDGs laufen Gefahr, sich zur Anti-Politik-Maschine zu entwickeln»

Potcast on Serena O. Dankwa's book "Knowing Women: Same-sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana"

"Knowing Women: Same-sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana" (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a study of same-sex desire in West Africa, which explores the lives and friendships of working-class women in southern Ghana who are intimately involved with each other. Based on in-depth research of the life histories of women in the region, Serena O. Dankwa highlights the vibrancy of everyday same-sex intimacies that have not been captured in a globally pervasive language of sexual identity.

Performing and Re-enacting Southern Italian Lament: Ritual Mourning and the Migration of Images in the Mediterranean

Rethinking New Media and Mediterranean Publics

Pioneering political ecology: perceptions of nature, Indigenous practices and power relations during Alexander von Humboldt's travels in Latin America

This article is an attempt to discuss the image of Alexander von Humboldt as a pure natural scientist with a humanist ethos, and to highlight that he was in fact one of the first thinkers who anticipated positions known today as political ecology. We outline that his universal knowledge obviously has contradictory perspectives, and was interpreted in several directions.

Kim Kessler's bachelor thesis published in The Australian Journal of Anthropology

Kim Kessler studied at our Institute from 2011 - 2015 and wrote his Bachelor's thesis on the history of anthropology at the University of the South Pacific during an exchange year in Fiji. It explores the paradox that the Pacific Island region has great significance for anthropology through research works by Margaret Mead, Raymond Firth and Derek Freeman, among others, but at the same time the discipline of anthropology has a niche existence in this region. After completing his Master's degree at the University of the South Pacific, Kim developed his Bachelor's thesis into a publication. He is now a PhD student at the University of Otago, NZ.

Rethinking the Mediterranean: Extending the Anthropological Laboratory Across Nested Mediterranean Zones

RESONANCECAST #1: VULNERABILITY

Podcast with Pascale Schild and Sandhya Fuchs, moderated by Ian M. Cook

Transnational moralities: Europe’s persistent politics of irresponsibility

Kim Kessler's bachelor thesis published in The Australian Journal of Anthropology

Kim Kessler studied at our Institute from 2011 - 2015 and wrote his Bachelor's thesis on the history of anthropology at the University of the South Pacific during an exchange year in Fiji. It explores the paradox that the Pacific Island region has great significance for anthropology through research works by Margaret Mead, Raymond Firth and Derek Freeman, among others, but at the same time the discipline of anthropology has a niche existence in this region. After completing his Master's degree at the University of the South Pacific, Kim developed his Bachelor's thesis into a publication. He is now a PhD student at the University of Otago, NZ.

The promise of solidarity

a new contribution to the Anthropological Theory Commons' debate on Solidarity.

Michaela Schäuble reviews the new film of Milo Rau “The New Gospel” for the Visual and New Media Review of Cultural Anthropologist

Minor keywords of political theory: Migration as a critical standpoint A collaborative project of collective writing. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space.

De Genova N, Tazzioli M, et al. Minor keywords of political theory: Migration as a critical standpoint A collaborative project of collective writing. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. March 2021. doi:10.1177/2399654420988563

Audiobeitrag "Neofaschismus in Italien" im Deutschlandfunk

Der Deutschlandfunk hat in der Sendung "Aus Kultur-und Sozialwissenschaften" das Buch von Lene Faust vorgestellt inklusive eines Audiobeitrags.

Special issue "Legal responsibility in an entangled world", Journal of Legal anthropology, Vol 4, 2 (Dec 2020)

Responsibility and accountability in entangled global relations are negotiated across jurisdictional boundaries, localities and scales of legality. In this special issue, we trace struggles for corporate accountability from extraction sites in Ecuador, Colombia and Peru to an abandoned asbestos factory in Italy. We enquire into the gap between the legal institutions which govern attributions of responsibility in procedural, tort and corporate laws, lived experiences of harm connected to transnational business activities and moral expectations of responsibility in global relations. In the struggles for justice discussed in this special issue, we detect potential ways of rethinking ascriptions of responsibility to reflect the deep entanglements of our economies.

Dr. Johanna Mugler im Interview mit Center for Taxpayer Rights in Washington DC.

new papers in the Journal of Peasant Studies (The Drama of the Grabbed Commons) by Tobias Haller

new papers in the Journal Conservation and Society (Institution Shopping and Resilience Grabbing) by Tobias Haller

The Hospital Multiple

The Hospital Multiple : New Somatosphere Series by Janina Kehr and Fanny Chabrol with an introduction on speculative infrastructures and the ethnographic possibilities of grasping hospitals otherwise.

Book Review

Review of Michael Jackson's book "How Lifeworlds Work: Emotionality, Sociality, and the Ambiguity of Being“ (2017) (PDF starting at page 35).

Why the World Needs Anthropologists

Edited By Dan Podjed, Meta Gorup, Pavel Borecký, Carla Guerrón Montero