Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology
The Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology is the peer-reviewed journal of the Swiss Anthropological Association and publishes ethnographically and theoretically grounded contributions on current issues and debates. As a tri-lingual journal, it strengthens the dialogue between different theoretical strands and scholarly traditions in social anthropology.
Swiss Anthropological Association SAA, Société Suisse d'Éthnologie SSE, Schweizerische Ethnologische Gesellschaft SEG
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How to narrate queer lives without reproducing the epistemic violence of abstraction? In this article, we address several tensions between portraying, as necessarily reductive process of description and representation, and Queerness, as performance of self-representation blurring cis-heteronormative categories, and therefore generating disciplinary processes. Drawing on these reflections, we also mobilize the flexibility of Queerness to highlight the articulations and assemblages between SOGIESC diversity and indigenous and/or racialized categorizations. Therefore, this article focusses on three key methodological challenges: is it possible—and even desirable—to translate Queer lives to make them intelligible? What is at stake when making visible some experiences and trajectories that somehow pursue the banality of invisibility? And finally, which kinds of light is shed on the knowledge production itself—through reflexivity and the elucidation of ethical dilemmas?
Copyright (c) 2026 Anne Lavanchy, Pere Morell i Torra, Jos Meléndez Duarte https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article presents an ethnographic and narrative portrait of Semonpiru, a middle-aged Bolivian Guaraní man who challenges social norms in various aspects of his life, including his sexuality and performance of masculinity. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research and a long-term relationship with Semonpiru, and from a reflexive positionality, the article examines non-normative masculinities, naming practices, and gender categories in everyday life among Bolivian Guaraní communities. Focusing on the local category kuña-kuña (“woman-woman”), applied to men perceived as insufficiently masculine, it shows the ways in which Guaraní gender norms shape social life and how Semonpiru’s singular subjectivity intersects with categorizations and the normative gaze of his social milieu, thus highlighting the ambivalent balance between regulating deviance and acknowledging its existence on their own terms.
Copyright (c) 2026 Pere Morell i Torra https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article engages with current debates in queer anthropology that interrogate gender and sexuality as discrete analytical domains and highlight their complex entanglement in colonial and capitalist structures of power. It focuses on the epistemological and methodological challenge of studying queerness while moving beyond both identity-based approaches and definitions relying on anti-normativity. Grounded in ethnographic material from Hyderabad (South India), the article explores intrinsic contradictions of normative regimes of kinship, gender, and sexuality and how they affect queer people in specific ways. It introduces the concept of “ethical labor” as an analytical tool for describing how living with those contradictions exacts unequal costs and yields unequal rewards for different kinds of people and thus allows to specify both the difference of queerness and differences within it.
Copyright (c) 2026 Stefan Binder https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Comfort of Standardisation in the Face of Funeral Pluralism
Losing a close relative in old age is nowadays a very common occurrence. But what does it mean in practice to organise a funeral for someone over 80, in a context characterised by the pluralisation of our relationship with death and the dead? This article tries to shed some light on this question. Based on an ethnographic study carried out in Switzerland on bereavement of oldest-old individuals, it focuses on the moment of funeral organisation between the oldest-old mourner, his or her relatives, and funeral professionals. It highlights, on the one hand, the effects of a particular context, that of a public funeral centre offering a (conditionally) “free of charge” regime, and, on the other hand, a particular mode of negotiation based on consensus, simplicity, and comfort, which is not unrelated to the age of the bereaved, during elaboration of funeral practices.
Copyright (c) 2026 Alexandre Pillonel, Marc-Antoine Berthod https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Arts Grappling with the Local and the Global
This introduction presents the special issue of the Swiss Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology entitled “Arts, Public Space, and Globalization.” It outlines the themes addressed in the contributions. The special issue allows us to observe the ways in which interconnected political challenges, induced by artistic presences in public space, co-produce transnational art spaces. It also explores how artistic proposals become politicized when they are put into action in everyday spaces.
Copyright (c) 2026 Aurore Dupuy, Magali Sizorn https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article focuses on the description of an ongoing ethnographic process. It explores the researcher’s first encounter with a new environment and the initial reflections that emerge from a queer and decolonial perspective. Two portraits, of a trans woman and of a group of chola women ascending the summit of Huayna Potosí, are encountered within the central square of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. These images, situated in a space historically shaped by colonial and patriarchal power, become narrative events that evoke questions about visibility, resistance, and the occupation of public space by marginalized bodies.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jos Meléndez Duarte https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article addresses ethical and methodological challenges I encountered while conducting fieldwork in the town of Camiri, between May 2023 and December 2024, as part of a research project on gender diversity in the Bolivian Chaco. Through the analysis of interviews with non-heterosexual people and my field notes, emerged the concept of mandate of invisibility, which refers to what is allow or not to be seen, in relation to gender expression and sexual identity. I reflect on how this mandate affects my work as a researcher and the impact my presence has in relation to the tensions between visibility and invisibility.
Copyright (c) 2026 Catalina Wins https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Filipe Calvão, Matthieu Bolay
This article emerges from the raw material of an ethnographic process that seeks to remain faithful to the overwhelming nature of juxtaposed spaces and times. The reader is invited to engage closely with the details as an exercise in recognizing how disorder reveals its own order within the very context in which it takes shape and meaning. We will walk through narrative figures in what I propose is a composed ontographic fractal, which outlines a portrait of two protagonists who are part of the sexgeneric dimension of a fieldwork carried out between two neighbouring cities, La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jhesmin Solis Peña https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Zakat, one of Islam's fundamental pillars, is a form of giving that requires every Muslim who qualifies based on wealth to support those in need materially. In his book Divine Money, Emanuel Schaeublin examines the relationships and practices surrounding zakat in Nablus, a city in Palestine. In the context of political and economic repression, the absence of social welfare programs, and military occupation, the book shows how giving is conceptualized – understood and given meaning – and practiced by invoking the presence of God.
Copyright (c) 2026 Zarina Urmanbetova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
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
Échelle Inconnue: The Invisible Aspects of Cities Explored through Research and Creativity
Founded in Rouen in 1998 and led by architect Stany Cambot, Échelle Inconnue brings together architects, researchers, artists, and residents to work on “the invisible aspects of cities and their representations”. This interview provides an opportunity to articulate and raise the issues surrounding art in public spaces from an architect’s perspective, at a time when art and culture are particularly influenced by urban planning and territorial development policies. Conducted in November 2023, when Rouen was still in the running to become European Capital of Culture 2028, the interview explored, through Stany Cambot’s career and the actions carried out by Échelle Inconnue, the themes addressed in this dossier. These include art in public spaces in the context of globalization.
Copyright (c) 2026 Magali Sizorn https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Book Review: Children as Social Butterflies
This submission is a review of Ursina Jaeger's Children as Social Butterflies. Navigating Belonging in a Diverse Swiss Kindergarten. The review critically examines Jaeger's exploration of the shifting social belongings of kindergarten children in a diversified Swiss neighborhood. It highlights the theoretical underpinnings, methodologies, and implications of this contribution in fields like childhood studies, schooling and migration.
Copyright (c) 2026 Tanja Luchsinger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The book Disability and Aid: An Ethnography of Logics and Practices of Distribution in a Ugandan Refugee Camp by Maria-Theres Schuler conceptualizes the predicaments of humanitarian aid, particularly as championed through global aid regimes and experienced by refugees. It problematizes the concepts of humanitarianism, refugee, migration, and disability based on rigorous ethnographic research in the form of participant observation and narrative interviews conducted in the Kyangwali refugee settlement in Uganda.
Copyright (c) 2026 Asebe Regassa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This submission is a review of Sandhya Fuchs's Fragile Hope. Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India. The review argues that Fragile Hope shows the success of India’s Atrocities Act cannot be measured by legal outcomes like convictions, but by how differently positioned actors experience and mobilize it. Through ethnography, Fuchs demonstrates that while the law is shaped by structural inequalities, it nonetheless generates a fragile but meaningful sense of hope and agency among Dalit communities.
Copyright (c) 2026 Pearl Pandya https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Queer, but Not Only… or the Politics of Pronouns
Drawing on the portrait of Vesta, this article explores the “politics of the pronoun” in two interrelated key ways. First, it analyses the stakes of using the portrait to convey a queer experience marked by disciplinary processes that seek the physical and/or linguistic erasure of bodies perceived as transgressive. It then extends this reflection to question the production of anthropological knowledge itself. The analysis of an individual experience through a collective “we” disrupts the traditional divide between a singular anthropological “I” and a plural yet homogenized “they”. The politics of the pronoun thus highlight both the processes of selecting and rearticulating data in order to generate an inevitably reductive coherence of queer lived experience, and the staging of the research team through the question of the researchers’ positionalities—caught between a desire for epistemological honesty and the risk of tokenism.
Copyright (c) 2026 Anne Lavanchy, Yosef Mar, Adriana Franceschi 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”.
Art-based (Teaching) Methods as Performance in Ethnography, Restitution, Dissemination
Despite the urgency of developing and promoting reflexivity and innovative, art-based methods as an alternative to the text-centredness of science in general and anthropology in particular – as a means of data collection and dissemination – wonderful, creative approaches often come up against institutional and science policy obstacles. This text presents successful examples from current research practice that discuss reflexivity and the representation of migration through audio-visual means of expression in an inter-generational dialogue: in particular films, performances, and graphic works.
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