Archives

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  Forms of Autonomy. Assembly Practices and Collective Decisions on the Margin of the State

  Vol. 30 No. 1 (2024)

  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.

  Guest editors: Paul Codjia and Raphaël Colliaux

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  The law of the outlaw: Law and order in, with, and beyond criminal groups

  Vol. 29 No. 1 (2023)

  This special issue of the Swiss Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology on “The law of the outlaw: Law and order with, within, and beyond criminal groups” examines the relationship between the law and different types of criminal and criminalised groups. While anthropology has produced a large body of work on legal issues, little research has been done on the relationship between the law as a heuristic category and criminal groups such as gangs, mafias or triads. Most representations of these criminal groups tend to see them as outlaws, often in active opposition to the established order. This special issue brings together contributions from two different academic traditions, the Francophone and Anglophone, which reflect on the relationship between the law and criminal groups in a different way. The bilingual introduction to the special issue reviews these two different legal anthropology traditions, before situating the way in which the law of the outlaw has been apprehended, and highlighting the potential contribution its study can make to the development of a pragmatic approach to law.

  Guest editors: Martin Lamotte and Dennis Rodgers
  

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  Anthropological Knowledge and Power Relations

  Vol. 28 (2022)

  The special issue of the Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology “Anthropological knowledge and power relations” questions the way in which power relations condition research - including from an intersectional perspective that considers, among other things, the interweaving of systems of gender, class, race, validism and age. It brings together work that shows how individuals question, accept, and/or subvert hierarchical relations within the processes of scientific fabrication. In this perspective, the introduction presents some of the issues that went through the construction of the special issue, in order to question the criteria of selectivity of the publication processes.

  Guest editor: Frédérique Leresche

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  Engaged Anthropology in and beyond Switzerland

  Vol. 27 (2022)

  TSANTSA's special issue "Engaged Anthropology in and beyond Switzerland" aims to shed light on and recognize the full potential of engaged anthropology and its place in academia and beyond. It argues for an inclusive approach to be both theoretically enriching and methodologically grounded in diverse practices and forms. The introduction addresses common confusions and obstacles distracting engaged anthropology from its core premises and potentials. As the Interface Commission of the Swiss Anthropological Association (SEG), we seek to deepen the conversation about how engagement bolsters the discipline to stay relevant and robust, and embark on new paths of theoretical reflection. By "repositioning" engaged anthropology at the heart of contemporary anthropology, we seek to overcome unproductive dichotomies on engagements and practices by embracing critical reflexivity in the process of knowledge production and social action.

  Guest editors: Peter Larsen, Doris Bacalzo, Mò Bleeker, Patrick Naef, Eda Elif Tibet, Leïla
                                                              Baracchini, Susie Riva

                                                             

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  Dis/connection Matters: Natural, Synthetic, Digital

  Vol. 26 (2021)

  The world is experiencing new relations between natural, synthetic, and digital substances. Rather than considering these as materially distinct or ontologically separate, this special issue of TSANTSA interrogates how they are interlocked in socio-material processes of mediation, transmutation, and valuation. By conceptualizing the specificity of their separateness, the special issue makes possible the comparison and commensuration of their relationship, and to move beyond their essential qualities. What are the boundaries, leakages, or dis/connections between human and digital, natural and artificial, the organic and synthetic matters? Based on ethnographic research in laboratories, gold refineries, bio-tech microbial seeds and digitally-produced natural sounds, human-machine apps and cellular agriculture, each contribution theorizes the mediation, transmutation, and valuation of natural synthetics, the humanness of artificial intelligence, or the materiality of digital elements.
  

  Guest editors: Filipe Calvão, Matthieu Bolay, and Lindsay Bell

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  Penal Institutions and Their Hybridizations "in Action"

  Vol. 25 (2020)

  The TSANTSA special issue 25/2020 Penal Institutions and Their Hybridizations "in Action" discusses the relationship between the penal state and the welfare state, between punishment, rehabilitation, and risk management, and between prison and non-custodial sentences. The contributions examine how these seemingly distinct areas empirically come together to constitute a “sociopenal continuum”. The contributions examine three forms of hybridization. The first form is apparent when two institutions pursuing distinct missions are called upon to collaborate in order to deal with the same public; the second emerges when two paradigms for intervention compete with each other within the same institutional framework; and the third can be observed in the trajectories of the publics of criminal justice institutions, marked by a diverse range of measures for intervention (whether social, judicial, or therapeutic).

  Guest editors: Géraldine Bugnon, Arnaud Frauenfelder, Armelle Weil

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  Decolonial Processes in Swiss Academia and Cultural Institutions: Empirical and Theoretical Approaches

  Vol. 24 (2019)

  This issue discusses aspects of decolonial processes and their relevance with regard to Swiss cultural institutions and higher education by presenting key concepts of decolonial thinking such as coloniality, modernity and de-linking. Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s suggestions for decolonising Western universities are juxtaposed with actual decolonial processes taking place in different academic, (art) education and museum settings in Switzerland and abroad, and their political dimensions are scrutinised.

  Guest editors: Fiona Siegenthaler, Marie-laure Allain Bonilla

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  Ethnographier les affects: captures, résistances, attachements

  Vol. 23 (2018)

  Vital and visceral in intensity, the affect has emerged as a research object in the social sciences in the last decade to the point of triggering an "affective turn" (Clough et al. 2007). The aim of this Special Issue is to explore the interest in developing this theme in anthropology and the potential of ethnographic research on affect or, more precisely as we suggest, affects.

  Guest editors: Carine Plancke, Valerio Simoni

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  Uncertain Futures

  Vol. 22 (2017)

  Ce nouveau numéro de Tsantsa éclaire les liens entre incertitude et futur. Il présente et articule six contributions qui analysent comment le futur, en tant que représentation sociale du temps et de temporalités, est mobilisé face à l’incertitude. Les six articles ethnographiques se penchent sur une diversité de situations d’incertitude, en Ouganda, au Gabon, au Sierra Leone, en Allemagne, et en Suisse. Les cas empiriques portent sur des problèmes du domaine médical, sur l’incertitude en matière ressources naturelles, sur des situations de liberté individuelle restreinte ou encore des conditions économiques précaires. 

  Éditrices invitées: Valeria Hänsch, Lena Kroeker, Silke Oldenburg

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  Espace public, cohabitation et marginalités: Quelles nouvelles réalités et quels enjeux pour les villes contemporaines ?

  Vol. 21 (2016)

  This special issue reflects on the different articulations between public space and marginalized populations, taking into account the imperatives of competition and visibility that affect contemporary cities, in Switzerland and across the world. Space has always been a controversial issue in urban life. Given its scarcity, space quickly becomes an issue of contention and competition in what regards to its possession, but also a symbolic issue in matters of neighbourhood control, access to public space and political domination. This special issue aims at understanding in what ways regulation of public space are influenced by, and influence in their turn the representations of otherness and of marginalized populations.

  Guest editors: Monika Litscher, Giada de Coulon, Annamaria Colombo

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  Anthropology and the Ontological Turn

  Vol. 20 (2015)

  Le dossier thématique de TSANTSA 20 est consacré au "tournant ontologique". Alors que le débat fait rage autour des différentes approches désormais subsumées sous cette appellation, opposant des chercheurs français, britanniques, danois, brésiliens et américains, il nous a semblé important qu’une revue européenne fasse un état apaisé de ce débat. Le "tournant ontologique" est une nouvelle façon de poser le problème qui est au cœur de l’anthropologie moderne.

  Éditrices et éditeur invité·e·s: Frédéric Keck, Ursula Regehr, Saskia Walentowitz