Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie
Die Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie ist die Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Ethnologischen Gesellschaft und publiziert ethnografisch und theoretisch fundierte Beiträge zu aktuellen Debatten und Themen der Sozialanthropologie. Die dreisprachige Zeitschrift versteht sich als Vermittlerin und Übersetzerin zwischen den verschiedenen Theorietraditionen.
Swiss Anthropological Association SAA, Société Suisse d'Éthnologie SSE, Schweizerische Ethnologische Gesellschaft SEG
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Copyright (c) 2025 Filipe Calvão, Matthieu Bolay
Introduction to the Special Issue Reciprocal Vulnerability
In this special issue, we seek to uncover the vulnerabilities of researchers in anthropological fieldwork and academia, tracing their political and epistemological potential for the creation of ethnographic knowledge that is based on practices of reciprocity and solidarity. We bring together contributions that explore how anthropologists recover from various experiences of discomfort, harm, and violence by creating bonds of care and support with others, including interlocutors and other researchers, that critically shape and reshape their perspectives and the knowledge they create. Vulnerabilities are powerful and revealing encounters with what makes us human in an entangled and unequal world. Building on reflexive and feminist anthropology, we introduce the concept of “reciprocal vulnerability”, recognizing that vulnerabilities are relational, shifting, and situational experiences and positionalities that can connect people across differences and inequalities, allowing for new forms of exchange and reciprocity to emerge and thrive in fieldwork and anthropology more generally.
Copyright (c) 2025 Pascale Schild, Wiebke Wiesigel, Paola Juan, Larissa da Silva Araujo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article presents the essential input of reflexivity for conducting ethnographic research in digital contexts to highlight how power relations are articulated with digital practices. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2022 among young Afghans in the Swiss asylum system, this paper examines how precarious legal statuses, such as those associated with temporary permits, shape digital practices and uses of Information and communications technology (ICT). By analysing online content and digital interactions collaboratively with my research participants, the study highlights how empowerment and surveillance mechanisms intertwine at transnational scales that contextualise digital practices. The diversity of shared media content is shaped by young people’s attunement to their audiences, their own precarious status, and sociopolitical dynamics, which, for this population, are impacted by the deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan since August 2021, as well as by institutional mistrust and the economic constraints they face in Switzerland.
Book review of The Afterlives of Extraction
Migration, Representation, and Reflexivity.
Contemporary anthropology increasingly confronts challenges of representation amid evolving cultural, social, and political landscapes. This special feature investigates how anthropologists engage in multimodal practices—from academic writing and digital media to performance and visualization—to convey research and negotiate power dynamics. It examines the transformation of field data into anthropological products, highlighting how politics, decoloniality, and ethical considerations shape representation. Through a two-part, student-led workshop, graduate students and practitioners explored alternative methods, employing self-reflection, performance, and creative visualization to address historical imbalances and misrepresentations. The resulting dialogue underscores the importance of reflexivity and engaged research practices that challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries. By integrating diverse perspectives and innovative techniques, the contributions call for a reimagined anthropology that embraces complexity and inclusivity while dismantling entrenched hierarchies. This feature ultimately advocates for a dynamic, performative approach to representing the “other” and rethinking scholarly practices. It offers a transformative roadmap for future anthropological inquiry with rigor.
Copyright (c) 2019 Federica Moretti, Serjara Aleman, Sara Wiederkehr
In my doctoral research, I work on memory practices of youth collectives in Quibdó, capital of the department of the Chocó (Colombian Pacific). Chocó is a territory marked by many stigmas, and Afro-Colombian youth in Quibdó is considered Other, dangerous, exotic, a symbol of social rupture, or a lost generation. How can we listen to a racialized youth and welcome the productive disruption it offers us? Through a dance performance, youth collectives in Quibdó actively respond to hegemonic, colonial and extractivist gazes. The performance opens up a space for expression and listening: the dancers return the gaze to the audience, questioning them, not allowing themselves to be transformed into objects of spectacle. They question the act of representation itself, focusing on “speaking” with the body and dance, rather than “representing”.
Kunst-basierte Methoden(-Lehre) als Performance in der Ethnographie, Restitution, Diffusion
Trotz der Dringlichkeit, Reflexivität sowie innovative, kunst-basierte Methoden als Alternative zur Text-Zentriertheit der Wissenschaft im Allgemeinen und der Anthropologie im Besonderen zu entwickeln und zu fördern – als Mittel zur Datenerhebung und zur Verbreitung-, stoßen sich wunderbare, kreative Ansätze oft an institutionellen und wissenschaftspolitischen Hindernissen. In diesem Text werden gelungene Beispiele aus der aktuellen Forschungspraxis vorgestellt, welche in einem inter-generationellen Dialog über Reflexivität und die Darstellung von Migration mittels audio-visueller Ausdrucksmittel nachdenken: insbesondere Filme, Performances und graphische Werke.
This foreword discusses the ongoing tradition of self-reflection and critique within anthropology, focusing on its impact on PhD students. It highlights how contemporary debates about representation, cultural performance, and decolonization challenge young scholars’ research projects and professional identities. I note that while self-criticism has been a constant in anthropology since the 1960s, it poses unique challenges for new researchers who strive to meet high ethical standards and innovative research expectations simultaneously. The foreword emphasizes the precarious position of PhD candidates, who must balance innovation with adherence to established schools of thought. Despite these challenges, I observe that current graduate students actively engage with disciplinary critiques, demon­strating thorough knowledge of original works and creating spaces for cross-disciplinary discussions. The foreword concludes by introducing a special issue featuring PhD candidates’ reflections on representational issues in their research, illustrating the ongoing importance of self-reflection in anthropology.
Mass Voilence, Self-Censorship, and the Diasporic Web
Conducting research among populations affected by mass violence, especially when such violence takes place in colonial contexts, raises ethical and methodological challenges that require reflexivity. Drawing on fieldwork conducted among the Uyghur diaspora of Istanbul between 2021 and 2023 for my PhD on Uyghur bread-making, I propose to address these challenges by examining the question of representation. In this article, I show how the people I met in the field confronted me not only with the issue of the representations, as a researcher, produce, but also with my own online positioning regarding the mass violence they are facing in their homeland.
ACTRACT. The Ascona Transformation Charter
In this 21st century, the enormous scale and extent of social inequalities and ecological devastation prompt us to revisit the relevance and positionality of anthropology as a discipline and a societal project. how then to address systemic change and transformation both within and outside the discipline of anthropology? We, as a collective of anthropologists from Switzerland and Europe, including members of the Swiss Anthropological Association (SSA), the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and the Swiss Graduate School of Anthropology gathered in Ascona from june 3 to 5, 2024. Hosted by the interface commission at the Centro Incontri Umani, we deliberated on the need and potential pathways for a transformative anthropology considering the triple planetary crisis, structural inequalities and deepening conflicts. drawing on initial discussions hosted by the Interface Commission in 2022 around the theme of "imagining new anthropological futures", the Ascona meeting sought to take stock of contemporary conversations on the future of anthropology, and of practices aimed at transforming the discipline to tackle current challenges.
Copyright (c) 2025 Peter Larsen, Doris Bacalzo, Ana Ivasuic, Eda Elif Tibet, Roberta Colombo, Kylian Henchoz , Claire Vionnet, Alexandra Oanca, Tobias Haller
Reaffirming the Role of Anthropology in Transformative Change
This brief response to reviews of the Ascona Charter asks how it resonates with and connects diverse realities, concerns, and experiences of transformation. The Charter responds to a collective call from students and engaged scholars for adopting collective action that prioritizes transformation and positive change in the world, rather than remaining caught in neoliberal metrics and individualized trajectories. By operationalizing the Charter’s values, anthropology can reclaim its relevance and contribute meaningfully to addressing the triple planetary crisis. Through embracing multimodal approaches, fostering ethical partnerships, and advocating for systemic change, anthropologists can play a pivotal role in addressing the pressing challenges of our time.
Copyright (c) 2025 Peter Bille Larsen, Eda Elif Tibet, Mike Poltorak
Book review of: Lems, Annika. 2022. Frontiers of Belonging: The Education of Unaccompanied Refugee Youth. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Opinion Piece for The Ascona Transformation Charter
This opinion piece discusses the relevance of The Ascona Transformation Charter in the Peruvian case.
What might the transformation in transformative anthropology entail? While several responses might be generated, one element that is generally kept to the background is transformation from within. This “inner enquiry” is not necessarily of the self-reflexivity school, nor of decolonizing initiatives, but one that asks for a deep decoloniality of the propertied self along with a deep ethnography with those designated as Other, objects or subjects of the anthropological endeavour. If we do not transform from within, we will continue to retain propertied notions of the self’s relationship to the world, Weltbeziehungen, with their objectified identities, differences and hierarchies both between human, and in relation to non-human lifeforms—which is how the chain-reaction of violences began culminating in the multiple planetary and societal crises of today. In critical response, I propose an anthropoesy—a co-creative conjunction with lifekind.
Ascona Charter Response—Towards a Just Academia
This contribution proposes a primary focus on academia as a relational economy that subtends academics as individuals, rather than on relationships running between academics and the outside world—such as research participants. In this regard, while we academics hide behind fatalistic determination that underlies the abstract idea of a “neoliberal academia”—as though “neoliberal academia” could ever be a given formula, a given reality—the “neoliberal academia” that also the Ascona Charter refers to is empirically about people’s attitudes, personal decisions and deeds. In order to liberate anthropologists from the discursive abstractivism of transformation, the contribution invites us to acknowledge the relational economy we are all part of and our own deontology of research and teaching as individual-centred and entirely individual-dependent.
Interview: An Intergenerational Dialogue on the Politics of Representation within Academia and Beyond
This interview is the edited excerpt of a dialogue recorded in the summer of 2023 between the three editors of this special feature and three experienced researchers: Prof. Susan Ossman, Dr. Eda Elif Tibet, and Dr. Nadine Wanono, who participated in a two-part CUSO module of the Swiss Graduate Program in Anthropology on Migration, Representation, and Reflexivity that the editors organized in 2020 and 2021. This interview is a follow-up of the conversations we initiated during the workshops, which constituted a florid ground to discuss past and present challenges in anthropology, as well as future developments of our anthropological practices.
Copyright (c) 2025 Serjara Aleman, Federica Moretti, Sara Wiederkehr
How can we not adhere to the values ​​proposed by the Ascona Charter? Has transforming anthropology in order to transform the world never been more urgent?
Copyright (c) 2025 Laurent Sébastien Fournier
This special issue of the Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology focuses on assembly practices as a tool for collective decision-making within human groups that claim multiple forms of political autonomy from States. The aim of this dossier is to ethnograph decision-making processes in various social spaces, both in a post-colonial indigenous context (Amazonia, Andes, North America) and in a Western European social movement (Spain). The description of these meetings reveals a multiplicity of strategies that people invent and implement in order to decide together, form a political union and try to build a society on terms that are distinct from those that characterize the state model. In doing so, these ethnographies invite us to reconsider the conceptual tools of anthropology for thinking about the political.
Copyright (c) 2024 Raphaël Colliaux, Paul Codija
In recent decades, anthropologists have increasingly recognised the researcher’s vulnerability as an inherent and indispensable element of ethnographic field research. This article shares my ethnographic fieldwork experiences navigating the intricate relationships of a coliving facility in Ho Chi Minh City. I argue that emotional engagement within fieldwork relationships—embracing the dual role of researcher and friend—can yield unexpected insights. Nevertheless, there are inherent complexities in negotiating a network of relationships that demand a high degree of emotional resilience, especially for anthropologists conducting research “at home”. This article calls on researchers to recognise reciprocal vulnerability not as a weakness, but as an asset for arriving
This article explores the process of “unveiling” researcher positionality during fieldwork in Swiss psychiatric spaces and in academia, whilst the researcher herself has a personal con­nection to the topic as a family member of someone with long-term psychological difficul­ties. I argue that vulnerability generates what I call “affective territories”. These are deci­sive in producing forms of knowledge that would otherwise escape researchers in fields where epistemic injustice is systemic. It shows how this positionality can become central in entering spaces of care and solidarity. But this unveiling also generated personal doubts concerning scholarly credibility. This paper tackles why, arguing that many academic cir­cles still equate such credibility with keeping an “objective” distance and remaining emo­tionally non-vulnerable. It highlights a paradox in anthropology: while reflexive inquiries into the affective and political entanglements within social suffering are epistemologically valued, academic cultures do not always provide supportive spaces for such positionings and methodologies.
Testimonies of Violence during Ethnographic Research
This article looks at how anthropologists deal with the effects of witnessing violence. Although anthropologists work in interaction with human beings, they rarely discuss the consequences of these encounters on their mental equilibrium. However, concepts such as vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue, developed in medical and social work literature, do provide some insight into the consequences of exposure to difficult narratives. Based on the author’s research notes on cocoa cultivation in Peru, this article interweaves her expe­rience with that of other researchers. This article proposes to consider these destabilizing effects of empirical research as an integral part of the research process, whatever the topic of the research, and thereby put the well-being of researchers at the heart of the methodology.
This paper explores the silence of my traumatic experience, the feeling of vulnerability, and insecurity that affected my fieldwork and the writing process. Drawing on the concept of “auto-reflexivity”, I address the “double violence”, experienced in the field and institutionally, where the lack of support in my academic environment exacerbated existing trauma. I conclude with recommendations on how individuals, our discipline, and institutions can better prepare and care for researchers. It is crucial that anthropologists discuss and share their experiences by including them in anthropological literature and methodology courses.
Weaponized Positionality? Coercive Disclosure in the "Publish or Perish" Academy
This paper brings anthropological scholarship on reflexivity and positionality in conversation with debates around issues of self-exploitation in the neoliberal university, to argue that the publication pressures early career anthropologists face, can cause them to feel that they must violate their own emotional and ethical boundaries to get their manuscript through peer review. Drawing on my own experience of being forced to disclose my past of traumatic violence to a journal, I show that reviewers’ and editors’ demands that anthro­pologists critically reflect on their positionality and on the power relations in their field site, can sometimes become weaponised against them. This can make academic publishing a site for new forms of violence, as well as for renewed trauma for young anthropological writers.
Rethinking the Role of Payments in Research
Navigating payments in ethnographic research provides insights into social dynamics within ethnographic research contexts. Drawing from research with financially vulnerable queer male sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya, this article explores the meanings of money, privilege, and reciprocity within this specific socio-cultural setting. Reflecting on my position as a researcher from the Global North, it acknowledges privileges and addresses academic vulnerabilities resulting from unconventional research practices. By examining the roles of payments and reciprocity in research relationships, this article calls for reassessment of payment norms when engaging with economically marginalized communities. It highlights challenges in discussing these matters openly in academic circles and advocates for increased transparency and dialogue about financial aspects of fieldwork with interlocutors. The shift towards mutual collaboration outlined in this article fosters balanced reciprocity, ultimately facilitating the co-production of socially relevant anthropological knowledge aimed at promoting social justice and transformation for marginalized communities.
This article draws on participant observation in a legal battle at the Quebec Superior Court in 2022, where the Kanien’kehá:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers) sought an injunction to halt excavation work around a hospital where Indigenous victims of medical experiments were allegedly buried. In response to a motion from the government of Quebec, the Mohawk Mothers refused to use a lawyer who would obey colonial law, arguing that it was their traditional duty as caretakers of the territory to speak for themselves and for their community without legal representation. This article examines their fight for self-determination through their specific understanding of the relationship between individual autonomy and social responsibility, notably by way of the Kanien’kehá:ka’s use of a single word to denote assemblies, fires, and families: Kahwá:tsire’. To reach a consensus, when it seems that everyone has come to an agreement, the Kanien’kehá:ka council must “stir the ashes” and ask everyone who has not spoken yet to voice their opinion and bring their unique perspective in the balance. As a result of this method, the author suggests that the Kanien’kehá:ka simultaneously take on the roles of legislators, executors, and judges all at once.
In 2010, following the approval of the constitutional right of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples and nations to political autonomy, the new Ministry of Autonomies is rushing to enforce it in various pilot indigenous municipalities. One of the candidates is the municipality of Tarabuco, renowned nationally and internationally for its material and ritual culture. An ethnography of the sessions of the assembly in charge of drafting a statute of autonomy, a local constitution to be recognized by the state in order to have access to the regime, shows the different perspectives of the process according to membership of local political institutions and organizations. After years of dispute, the organizations in place decided to abandon the process, which was deemed too dirigiste, leaving no room for in-depth debate on what becoming autonomous meant locally. The scuttling of the process was seen as a sovereign gesture in the face of attempts to impose a prefabricated autonomy system.
Copyright (c) 2024 Verónica Calvo Valenzuela
It Takes More Than One To Hold Complexity
This article discusses the potentials and challenges of psychoanalytically oriented “interpretation workshops”: interpretive, collective spaces that address ethnographic fieldwork’s subconscious, emotional, and experiential aspects. While notions of scientific objectivity and epistemic violence towards interlocutors in anthropology have faced ample critiques, applied methodological tools for doing otherwise still seem scarce. Interpretation workshops offer a collectively entangled alternative to disembodied, patriarchal, and ultimately violent notions of anthropological knowing. Based on a reflection of my participation in an interpretation workshop, I discuss how reciprocal vulnerabilities were addressed in ethically and epistemologically relevant ways in this context.
In the Peruvian Amazon’s lower Marañón basin, the prospect of an indigenous assembly appears unlikely: how can previously semi-nomadic groups, historically immersed in recurrent warfare, come together in a cohesive political entity? This transformation is undoubtedly a product of historical processes, greatly influenced by Western political structures and legal frameworks. However, does this shift erase the traditional conflicts among Amazonian groups? The criteria defining indigenous identity and collective action still bear traces of past hostilities, albeit reshaped by indigenous political dynamics. This article draws from the ethnography of a federation assembly to delve into the nuances between fragmentation and unity. Through the lens of assembly issues, it seeks to uncover both the ruptures and continuities defining contemporary indigenous communities.
This article introduces the special issue through a review of Francophone and Anglo-Saxon legal anthropology traditions, before situating the law of the outlaw within these and outlining its potential contribution towards the development of a pragmatic approach to law.
Copyright (c) 2023 Dennis Rodgers, Martin Lamotte
Copyright (c) 2023 Martin Lamotte, Dennis Rodgers