Ethnographic Imagination Basel

Mark Goodale, a Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne, dives into the world of extractivism and lithium in Bolivia. He discusses the political economy tied to raw materials and how extractive practices shape futures. Goodale explores the complex interplay between green energy aspirations, local impacts, and historical patterns in Bolivian extractivism. He emphasizes the importance of ethnography in understanding community narratives amid a lithium rush, raising questions about who truly benefits from these global shifts.

How can plastic offer us an important window into today's epochal conundrum? This episode, On Plastics, looks at a historically salient material, ever so complexly entangled in our bodies and everyday life, with our guest Brenda Chalfin, whose ethnographic work explores plastic along with other material flows in the contemporary social life of urban Ghana. Chalfin is a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, where she has also held the position of director of the Centre for African Studies. Her research primarily investigates issues related to state formation, urban environments, material infrastructures, and political economies across West Africa. She has paid particular attention to the public life and governance of material flows from plastics to human waste to water, offshore oil and indigenous commodities.Chalfin is the author of numerous articles and the author of Shea Butter Republic (2004), Neoliberal Frontiers. An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa (2010) and Waste Works. Vital Politics in Urban Ghana (2023).Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.Production: Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) incollaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.

What does the desire to overcome death and preserve oneself for the far future tell us about the world in which we live? Immortality, ways to overcome death in the present, as imagined through new secular technologies, is what we discuss in this episode with our guest, Abu Farman, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York. His scholarly work explores how recent investments in immortality have generated new understandings of the human. A large portion of his research and writings, focuses on secularization in relation to post-humanism, technology and aesthetics, and also more widely, questions of religion and secularism, science, dying, and indigenous autonomy. Among Farman`s publications is the book Clerks of the Passage (2012), an extended essay on movement migration. He has also authored numerous essays on topics as diverse as transhumanism, health, informatics, selves, cosmos and cosmologies, death and the infinite. This episode is centered around his book On Not Dying. Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience (2020) is a fascinating study about secular technological investments in overcoming death in the American context.  Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.Production: Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) incollaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.

How might thinking about love, against and beyond dominant representations help us understand our attachments differently? In this episode with Serena Owusua Dankwa, we discuss love, affective attachments and emotional entanglements as studied by anthropologists. Dankwa is Senior Lecturer of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel, and her research and writing focus on questions related to gender sexuality intimacy in West Africa and Europe. Her work has spun from a long-term ethnographic work with women who love other women in southern Ghana to questions of subjectivity and experience in contexts of feminist humanitarianism, especially as they focus on gender-based violence or sex trafficking in Switzerland, Mali, and Bosnia. The conversation focuses on her book, Knowing Women. Same-sex Intimacy Gender and Identity in Post-colonial Ghana (2021), a book that has received the prestigious Ruth Benedict award and the Elliott Skinner award from the American Anthropological Association.  Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.Production: Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) incollaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel

How does attending to and engaging our senses reveal our world otherwise?Our guest on this episode, On Sensing is David Howes, professor of anthropology and co-director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University. Howes is recognized as one of the leading figures in the anthropology of the senses and a theorist within the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies. His research and teaching cover fields such as the anthropology of the senses, sensory ethnography consumption, material culture, art and aesthetics, law and legal anthropology.This conversation focuses on two of his monographs, Sensual Relations Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (2003) and Sensorial Investigations. A History of the Senses in Anthropology, Psychology and Law  (2023), which explore the engagement of perception across different temporal and spatial contexts. He is the author of numerous books including monographs such as Ways of Sensing Understanding the Senses in Society (2014), co-authored with Constance Classen and The Sensory Studies Manifesto: Tracking the Sensorial Revolution in the Arts and Human Sciences (2022) Sensorium: Contextualizing the Senses and Cognition in History and Across Cultures(2024). Howes is also editor of numerous essay collections on the senses, including The Empire of the Senses.The Sensual Culture Reader (2005) and The Sixth Sense Reader (2009).  Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.Production: Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel

What do depictions of the devil reveal about modernity, late capitalism and the world at large? In this episode with Birgit Meyer, professor of religious studies at Utrecht University, we talk about the devil in images and imaginaries of evil from religious cultures to the culture of consumption. Meyer is a cultural anthropologist whose scholarly work centres on the forces of darkness in relation to new religious movements, film media, and the senses. Her research encompasses the increasing prominence of global Pentecostalism and the complex relationship between religion and popular culture, heritage, media, and the public sphere. She is widely recognized in anthropology and African Studies for her contributions to understanding Pentecostalism and late capitalism in post-colonial West Africa, with a particular focus on Ghana. Meyer has led numerous collaborative projects and has published edited and co-edited essay collections, including Magic and Modernity Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (2003), Religion Media and the Public Sphere (2005), and Aesthetic Formations. Media, Religion, and the Senses (2009), Sense and Essence. Heritage and Cultural Production of the Real (2018).This episode focuses on two monographs: Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana  (1999), and Sensational Movies: Video Vision and Christianity in Ghana (2015). Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.Production: Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) incollaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel

Anima Adjepong, Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, joins us as a guest in this episode, On Erotics. The discussion begins with the concept of the erotic as a form of sensual and aesthetic relationality that challenges traditional notions of objectivity and rationality.  Adjepong's scholarly work has explored the intersections of erotics with gender, sexuality, race, class, and knowledge production while also addressing themes of belonging, freedom, and the complexities of class, race, and transnationalism in both Ghana and the United States. The dialogue explores how the erotic can provide ways to reimagine our engagement with an understanding of the world.      Adjepong is author of the book Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra (2021), which presents an ethnographic examination of how Ghanaians living abroad utilize African imaginaries to shape their identities. This work highlights a unique form of cosmopolitanism that intricately weaves racial identities within the broader context of gender, sexuality, and religion. Additional contributions include articles and chapters with titles such as "Invading Ethnography: A Queer of Colour Reflexive Practice"(2019), “Whiteness Engendered Violence on the Rugby Pitch" (2021), and "Women's Football and Gendered Nationalism in Ghana" (2022). This episode emphasizes in particular their 2019 essay, “Erotic Ethnography, Sex Spirituality, and Embodiment in Qualitative Research.”     Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Production: Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.

This episode, “On Humanitarianism”, reviews how the incitement to rescue and save others has become vital to how we are what we are in the contemporary world.  It also examines how a particular perspective on humanitarianism may help us better understand the current global order. Our guest is Inderpal Grewal, professor emerita of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Grewal is one of the pioneers of the field known today as Transnational Feminist Studies and has conducted extensive research on questions focused on post-colonialism, mobility and modernity, non-governmental organizations and human rights, law and citizenship, among many other subjects.   Some of her notable publications include Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (1996), Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (2005), and Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First Century America (2017). Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Production: Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.  

Our guest on episode #13, On Trance, is Michaela Schäuble. Her scholarly work explores innovative ways to engage with the experiences of trance through writing, film, and photography. This episode examines the transformative potential of ecstatic experiences of trance, the state of ecstasy and exuberance associated with mediumship. Our discussion centers on trance, forms of possession, and mediumship, which have long fascinated anthropologists and challenged their understanding and representational possibilities.   Michaela Schäuble, a professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern in Switzerland, is also an acclaimed documentary filmmaker. She is one of the co-founders and Co-directors of Ethnographic Media Space Bern, a creative collective of anthropologists engaged in audio-visual methods as part of knowledge production. Prior to her current position, she taught at the University of Manchester in England and the Martin Luther University in Halle Wittenberg, Germany.  Schäuble's diverse research interests span media and audio-visual anthropology, religion, social memory, gender space, and nationalism, offering rich and engaging perspectives.   She is author of Narrating Victimhood. Gender Religion and the Making of Place in Post-war Croatia (2014). She is also the author of numerous articles and chapters on topics as diverse as Mediterranean anthropology, anthropology of post-socialism, ritual and commemoration, masculinity and placemaking, as well as ethnographic methods beyond the written word. One of her current projects focuses on the phenomenon of tarantism in southern Italy, an ensemble of bodily afflictions and healing practices that involve trance-like experiences.   Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Production: Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.

Our conversation on this episode, On Data, is with  Alec Bălăşescu, associate faculty at the Royal Roads University in British Columbia, Canada. Bălăşescu is a social and cultural anthropologist whose research and teaching range from bodily aesthetics, fashion, and politics to human-technology interactions, climate change, and health, Primarily through the prism of machine learning, algorithms and their implications for an ethnographic imagination.    Bălăşescu is the author of Paris Chic, Tehran Thrills: Aesthetic Bodies, Political Subjects (2007), a book that traces the circulations of fashion between France and Iran to reflect on the intersections of consumption, modernity, and religion. His more recent work  revolves around human-technology interactions: “Machine Anthropology, Or, Will Robots Talk About Us Behind Our Backs” (2020); and “Augmented Anthropology: Interstitial Anthropology in the Limits of Humanity.” (2024), co-authored with Cristina Luna and published in the Journal of Future Robot Life.     Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Production:  Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.