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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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
Copyright (c) 2025 Filipe Calvão, Matthieu Bolay
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
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 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
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
“You Don’t Take the Same Pictures as Us!”
The integration—both unexpected and welcome—of an occupational therapist into a research team of sociologists working with visual methods provided an opportunity to examine the gaze each brought to the field through the camera lens. This article presents the dialogue that developed between the occupational therapist and the doctoral student in sociology during working sessions in which they viewed each other’s photos. This dialogue initially took the form of a mutual questioning, with each person questioning what the other had intended to show with the given shot, and then evolved towards an alignment of gazes built collectively around the purposes of the research.
Contributions in Audio-Visual Anthropology
Copyright (c) 2026 Aline Boeuf, Laurence Claurepierre Buratti, Cornelia Hummel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
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
This article analyses a participative project run by a lyric ensemble to celebrate the diversity of the cultural heritage of Seine-Saint-Denis during the Paris Cultural Olympiad (2023–2024). The team recorded 400 songs from residents, which were used to create polyphonies, performed by amateur choirs during participative concerts in the public space. This ethnographic study reveals the “malaise” (Clifford 1988) gradually felt by the artistic team and the support personnel, articulated in terms of “cultural appropriation”. Faced with this question—which lies at the crossroads of the scholarly and popular spheres—the composers came up with different types of arrangements that profoundly altered the initial project. This article looks at the controversies in the art world surrounding the use, by established Western artists, of popular music from historically minoritized cultures in projects with universalizing aims.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elodie Bordat-Chauvin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
In the last two decades, shortcomings brought on by the crises of neoliberalism have pushed Latin American circus artists to reclaim the streets as their stage and to engage in transnational circulations. Based on an investigation conducted in Chile between 2016 and 2019, this article delves into the moral ambivalence that arises in the street circus activity from the intertwining of artistic, political, and economic motivations, with circus being seen as a way of criticizing dominant stances and order as well as a “good” way of earning one’s life in the Global South. The contradictions raised are analysed through the concepts of “artist critique” (Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski) and of “neoliberal reason” (Veronica Gago), showing how street circus challenges some oppositions that structure most of the art worlds, by reconfiguring the sense of critic and the economic necessities.
Copyright (c) 2026 Aurore Dupuy https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Kanak Youth’s Artistic and Political Engagement in Mainland France
This article explores the artistic and political engagement of a collective of young people from Kanaky–New Caledonia, who were temporarily living in France during the referendum period (2018–2022)—a decisive moment in the history of the archipelago, marked by deep uncertainty about its future. More specifically, the article follows the organisation of a cultural festival held in September 2021 on the Larzac plateau in southern France, along with a series of artistic residencies that preceded it. Through artistic expression and strategic occupations of public spaces—from urban parks to rural resistance zones—Kanak youth have created platforms that transcend geographic and colonial boundaries, enabling them to articulate political visions and reclaim agency in the decolonisation process. Drawing on the concept of decolonial cosmopolitanism, the article highlights how these artistic initiatives challenge the center–periphery dynamics inherited from the colonial past by fostering forms of rootedness in the homeland, reactivating silenced local memories, and encouraging solidarity with other local movements.
Copyright (c) 2026 Matteo Gallo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
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.