Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology
type: channel
description: 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.
publisher: Swiss Anthropological Association SAA, Société Suisse d'Éthnologie SSE, Schweizerische Ethnologische Gesellschaft SEG
language: en
publication name: Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology
issn: 2813-5229
copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
items: Portraits of Queerness
items: Naming Semonpiru
items: “This is the Life of Kotis”
items: The Comfort of Standardisation in the Face of Funeral Pluralism
items: Arts Grappling with the Local and the Global
items: Narrative Events of Queerness
items: Mandate of Invisibility
items: Editorial SJSCA 31/2025
items: Walking, Experiencing, Conceptualizing
items: Book Review.
items: Introduction to the Special Issue Reciprocal Vulnerability
items: Échelle Inconnue: The Invisible Aspects of Cities Explored through Research and Creativity
items: Book Review: Children as Social Butterflies
items: Book Review: Fragile Hope
items: Queer, but Not Only… or the Politics of Pronouns
items: Reflexivity in Digital Contexts
items: Book review of The Afterlives of Extraction
items: Migration, Representation, and Reflexivity.
items: Escaping the Game of Representation
items: Art-based (Teaching) Methods as Performance in Ethnography, Restitution, Dissemination
items: Foreword
items: Mass Voilence, Self-Censorship, and the Diasporic Web
items: ACTRACT. The Ascona Transformation Charter
items: Reaffirming the Role of Anthropology in Transformative Change
items: Book Review of Frontiers of Belonging
items: Opinion Piece for The Ascona Transformation Charter
items: Anthropoesy
items: Ascona Charter Response—Towards a Just Academia
items: Interview: An Intergenerational Dialogue on the Politics of Representation within Academia and Beyond

Portraits of Queerness
type: item
description: 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?
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: Queerness
  topic: keywords
subject: Bolivia
  topic: keywords
subject: plurinationality
  topic: keywords
subject: intersectionality
  topic: keywords
subject: translation
  topic: keywords
creator: Anne Lavanchy
creator: Pere Morell i Torra
creator: Jos Meléndez Duarte
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Anne Lavanchy, Pere Morell i Torra, Jos Meléndez Duarte https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-06-25
publication date: 2026-06-25
starting page: 5
ending page: 11
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2026.33.12800

Naming Semonpiru
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: masculinities
  topic: keywords
subject: sex-gender diversity
  topic: keywords
subject: naming practices
  topic: keywords
subject: ethnographic narrative
  topic: keywords
subject: Bolivian Guaraní
  topic: keywords
subject: Bolivian Chaco
  topic: keywords
creator: Pere Morell i Torra
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Pere Morell i Torra https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-06-25
publication date: 2026-06-25
starting page: 12
ending page: 21
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2026.33.11913

“This is the Life of Kotis”
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: ethics
  topic: keywords
subject: normativity
  topic: keywords
subject: gender
  topic: keywords
subject: sexuality
  topic: keywords
subject: kinship
  topic: keywords
subject: South India
  topic: keywords
creator: Stefan Binder
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Stefan Binder https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-06-25
publication date: 2026-06-25
starting page: 58
ending page: 65
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2026.33.11809

The Comfort of Standardisation in the Face of Funeral Pluralism
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Research Articles
  topic: section
subject: Interview
  topic: category
subject: funeral practice
  topic: keywords
subject: oldest-old individuals
  topic: keywords
subject: Switzerland
  topic: keywords
subject: pluralisation
  topic: keywords
subject: ethnography
  topic: keywords
creator: Alexandre Pillonel
creator: Marc-Antoine Berthod
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Alexandre Pillonel, Marc-Antoine Berthod https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-06-25
publication date: 2026-06-25
starting page: 66
ending page: 81
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2026.33.12482

Arts Grappling with the Local and the Global
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: arts
  topic: keywords
subject: public space
  topic: keywords
subject: globalization
  topic: keywords
subject: politics
  topic: keywords
subject: ethnography
  topic: keywords
creator: Aurore Dupuy
creator: Magali Sizorn
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Aurore Dupuy, Magali Sizorn https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-05-20
publication date: 2026-05-20
starting page: 5
ending page: 17
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.32.12475

Narrative Events of Queerness
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: queer/cuir
  topic: keywords
subject: indigenous
  topic: keywords
subject: Bolivia
  topic: keywords
subject: ethnography
  topic: keywords
subject: decolonial
  topic: keywords
subject: trans bodies
  topic: keywords
creator: Jos Meléndez Duarte
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Jos Meléndez Duarte https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-06-25
publication date: 2026-06-25
starting page: 30
ending page: 39
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2026.33.11905

Mandate of Invisibility
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: queer anthropology
  topic: keywords
subject: sex-gender diversity
  topic: keywords
subject: Bolivian Chaco
  topic: keywords
subject: ethnography
  topic: keywords
subject: mandate of invisibility
  topic: keywords
creator: Catalina Wins
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Catalina Wins https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-06-25
publication date: 2026-06-25
starting page: 22
ending page: 29
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2026.33.11911

Editorial SJSCA 31/2025
type: item
subject: Editorial
  topic: section
subject: editorial
  topic: keywords
creator: Filipe Calvão
creator: Matthieu Bolay
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Filipe Calvão, Matthieu Bolay
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 7
ending page: 8
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.12366

Walking, Experiencing, Conceptualizing
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: affect
  topic: keywords
subject: fieldwork
  topic: keywords
subject: ontography
  topic: keywords
subject: method
  topic: keywords
creator: Jhesmin Solis Peña
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Jhesmin Solis Peña https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-06-25
publication date: 2026-06-25
starting page: 40
ending page: 47
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2026.33.11909

Book Review.
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Book and Film Reviews
  topic: section
subject: Islam
  topic: keywords
subject: giving
  topic: keywords
subject: Palestine
  topic: keywords
subject: zakat
  topic: keywords
creator: Zarina Urmanbetova
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Zarina Urmanbetova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-05-20
publication date: 2026-05-20
starting page: 99
ending page: 101
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.32.12337

Introduction to the Special Issue Reciprocal Vulnerability
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: vulnerability
  topic: keywords
subject: ethnographic fieldwork
  topic: keywords
subject: academia
  topic: keywords
subject: reciprocity
  topic: keywords
subject: privilege
  topic: keywords
subject: solidarity
  topic: keywords
subject: care
  topic: keywords
creator: Pascale Schild
creator: Wiebke Wiesigel
creator: Paola Juan
creator: Larissa da Silva Araujo
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Pascale Schild, Wiebke Wiesigel, Paola Juan, Larissa da Silva Araujo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 11
ending page: 27
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.12167

Échelle Inconnue: The Invisible Aspects of Cities Explored through Research and Creativity
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Special Issue
  topic: section
subject: Interview
  topic: category
subject: interview
  topic: keywords
subject: architecture
  topic: keywords
subject: art
  topic: keywords
subject: city
  topic: keywords
subject: public space
  topic: keywords
creator: Magali Sizorn
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Magali Sizorn https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-05-20
publication date: 2026-05-20
starting page: 73
ending page: 87
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.32.12165

Book Review: Children as Social Butterflies
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Book and Film Reviews
  topic: section
subject: belonging
  topic: keywords
subject: migration
  topic: keywords
subject: childhood
  topic: keywords
subject: Switzerland
  topic: keywords
creator: Tanja Luchsinger
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Tanja Luchsinger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-06-25
publication date: 2026-06-25
starting page: 85
ending page: 87
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2026.33.12074

Book Review.
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Book and Film Reviews
  topic: section
subject: humanitarianism
  topic: keywords
creator: Asebe Regassa
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Asebe Regassa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-05-20
publication date: 2026-05-20
starting page: 102
ending page: 104
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.32.12017

Book Review: Fragile Hope
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Book and Film Reviews
  topic: section
subject: book review
  topic: keywords
creator: Pearl Pandya
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Pearl Pandya https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-06-25
publication date: 2026-06-25
starting page: 82
ending page: 84
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2026.33.12016

Queer, but Not Only… or the Politics of Pronouns
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: queerness
  topic: keywords
subject: reflexivity
  topic: keywords
subject: asylum
  topic: keywords
subject: collective fieldwork
  topic: keywords
subject: epistemology
  topic: keywords
creator: Anne Lavanchy
creator: Yosef Mar
creator: Adriana Franceschi
rights: Copyright (c) 2026 Anne Lavanchy, Yosef Mar, Adriana Franceschi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
date: 2026-06-25
publication date: 2026-06-25
starting page: 48
ending page: 57
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2026.33.11930

Reflexivity in Digital Contexts
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: migration
  topic: keywords
subject: reflexivity
  topic: keywords
subject: digital
  topic: keywords
subject: surveillance
  topic: keywords
subject: Afghanistan
  topic: keywords
subject: precarity
  topic: keywords
creator: Nina Khamsy
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Nina Khamsy
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 147
ending page: 156
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11886

Book review of The Afterlives of Extraction
type: item
subject: Book and Film Reviews
  topic: section
subject: energy
  topic: keywords
subject: democracy
  topic: keywords
subject: resource extraction
  topic: keywords
subject: extractivism
  topic: keywords
creator: Filippo Bozzini
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Filippo Bozzini
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 214
ending page: 216
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11852

Migration, Representation, and Reflexivity.
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: engaged anthropology
  topic: keywords
subject: multimodal practices
  topic: keywords
subject: representation
  topic: keywords
subject: reflexivity
  topic: keywords
subject: performance
  topic: keywords
creator: Serjara Aleman
creator: Federica Moretti
creator: Sara Wiederkehr
rights: Copyright (c) 2019 Federica Moretti, Serjara Aleman, Sara Wiederkehr
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 125
ending page: 132
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11848

Escaping the Game of Representation
type: item
description: 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”.
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: representation
  topic: keywords
subject: dance
  topic: keywords
subject: Chocó
  topic: keywords
subject: youth
  topic: keywords
subject: ethnography
  topic: keywords
subject: experience
  topic: keywords
creator: Claudia Howald
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Claudia Howald
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 133
ending page: 146
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11827

Art-based (Teaching) Methods as Performance in Ethnography, Restitution, Dissemination
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: art
  topic: keywords
subject: reflexivity
  topic: keywords
subject: performance
  topic: keywords
subject: migration
  topic: keywords
subject: film
  topic: keywords
subject: graphic anthropology
  topic: keywords
creator: Monika Salzbrunn
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Monika Salzbrunn
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 175
ending page: 181
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11784

Foreword
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: self-reflection
  topic: keywords
subject: representation
  topic: keywords
subject: PhD students
  topic: keywords
subject: disciplinary critique
  topic: keywords
creator: Esther Leemann
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Esther Leemann
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 121
ending page: 124
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11772

Mass Voilence, Self-Censorship, and the Diasporic Web
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: Uyghurs
  topic: keywords
subject: diaspora
  topic: keywords
subject: mass violence
  topic: keywords
subject: East Turkestan
  topic: keywords
subject: online positioning
  topic: keywords
subject: bread-making
  topic: keywords
creator: Léo Maillet
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Léo Maillet
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 157
ending page: 165
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11750

ACTRACT. The Ascona Transformation Charter
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Debates
  topic: section
subject: transformation
  topic: keywords
subject: anthropology
  topic: keywords
subject: engagement planetary crisis
  topic: keywords
subject: inequalities
  topic: keywords
creator: Peter Larsen
creator: Doris Bacalzo
creator: Ana Ivasuic
creator: Eda Elif Tibet
creator: Roberta Colombo
creator: Kylian Henchoz
creator: Claire Vionnet
creator: Alexandra Oanca
creator: Tobias Haller
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Peter Larsen, Doris Bacalzo, Ana Ivasuic, Eda Elif Tibet, Roberta Colombo, Kylian Henchoz , Claire Vionnet, Alexandra Oanca, Tobias Haller
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 185
ending page: 196
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11751

Reaffirming the Role of Anthropology in Transformative Change
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Debates
  topic: section
subject: engaged anthropology
  topic: keywords
subject: transformation
  topic: keywords
subject: ethics
  topic: keywords
subject: planetary crisis
  topic: keywords
subject: reflexivity
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creator: Peter Bille Larsen
creator: Eda Elif Tibet
creator: Mike Poltorak
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Peter Bille Larsen, Eda Elif Tibet, Mike Poltorak
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 209
ending page: 213
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11747

Book Review of Frontiers of Belonging
type: item
description: Book review of: Lems, Annika. 2022. Frontiers of Belonging: The Education of Unaccompanied Refugee Youth. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
subject: Book and Film Reviews
  topic: section
subject: book review
  topic: keywords
creator: Marco Motta
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Marco Motta
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 217
ending page: 219
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11732

Opinion Piece for The Ascona Transformation Charter
type: item
description: This opinion piece discusses the relevance of The Ascona Transformation Charter in the Peruvian case.
subject: Debates
  topic: section
subject: invited opinion piece
  topic: keywords
creator: Danny Pinedo
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Danny Pinedo
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 197
ending page: 198
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11709

Anthropoesy
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Debates
  topic: section
subject: engaged anthropology
  topic: keywords
subject: multi-species anthropology
  topic: keywords
subject: decoloniality
  topic: keywords
subject: co-creative action research
  topic: keywords
creator: Raminder Kaur
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Raminder Kaur
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 201
ending page: 205
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11678

Ascona Charter Response—Towards a Just Academia
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Debates
  topic: section
subject: personalization
  topic: keywords
subject: relational economy
  topic: keywords
subject: behavioural dissonance
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subject: radical pedagogy
  topic: keywords
subject: discursive abstractivism
  topic: keywords
creator: Estella Carpi
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Estella Carpi
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 206
ending page: 208
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11677

Interview: An Intergenerational Dialogue on the Politics of Representation within Academia and Beyond
type: item
description: 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.
subject: Current Research
  topic: section
subject: Interview
  topic: category
subject: anthropology
  topic: keywords
subject: collaboration
  topic: keywords
subject: migration
  topic: keywords
subject: performance
  topic: keywords
subject: reflexivity
  topic: keywords
subject: representation
  topic: keywords
subject: visual methodologies
  topic: keywords
subject: co-construction of knowledge
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creator: Serjara Aleman
creator: Federica Moretti
creator: Sara Wiederkehr
rights: Copyright (c) 2025 Serjara Aleman, Federica Moretti, Sara Wiederkehr
date: 2025-11-13
publication date: 2025-11-13
starting page: 166
ending page: 174
doi: 10.36950/sjsca.2025.31.11676