Ethnographic Imagination Basel

How can embodiment be a key site from which to tackle the world in which we live? This episode, On Bodies , features Sabine Mohamed, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, who discusses the ways in which historical and social transformations are shaped by corporeal experiences. Sabine's research examines the relationships among bodies, race, infrastructures, and futur...

How do migrations foster the development of imaginative strategies, and in what ways do the constraints encountered during these transitions prompt innovative approaches to navigating and reshaping our world? In this episode, we examine migration, focusing on the aspirations, economic factors, and intermediaries that have influenced transnational mobility. Our guest, Charles Piot, investigates mig...

How can thinking about funerals and life's endings offer new ways to imagine our worlds? In this episode , On Endings , our guest Anne Allison, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, discusses planning for life endings and how it has shifted in recent decades. Allison's work examines the intersection of political economy and ever...

How does the act of displaying items allow us to reassess our connection to the past and guide us towards new futures? In this episode, we will explore the concept of display, which includes the showcasing of images, objects, ideas, and bodies in museums and beyond. Our guest is Dr. Friedrich von Bose, Director of the Museum der Kulturen Basel, who merges imaginative approaches with scholarly rese...

In this episode On Extractivism , the conversation centres on how the unpredictability of extractive economies opens and forecloses various futures, a global market premised on the extraction of natural resources and raw materials. Our guest is Mark Goodale, professor of cultural and social anthropology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland whose work explores lithium extraction, new global g...

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 anthropol...

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...

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...

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 anthropolo...

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...

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 wi...

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 i...

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 medium...

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...

In this episode, On Surveillance, our guest is Katherine Verdery, Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Department of Anthropology at the City University of New York. Her research has explored a vast set of topics, from property relations in agriculture and the political economy of social inequality and ethnic ties to the socialist and post-socialist politics...

What can be gained from discussing materiality, as opposed to simply talking about objects? This episode, On Materiality, examines what it means to engage with objects, substances, and textures. We contemplate the more profound implications of our relationship with things, how we can think through them, and how this connects to the work of political imagination. Our guest, Carine Ayélé Durand, is...

What does it mean to live in a world defined by mobility, a world where the here and now are also so centrally defined multiple elsewheres?  In this episode, On Diaspora, our guest, Ghassan Hage, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne, Australia, engages in a thought-provoking discussion of the concept of diaspora. Hage brings a wealth of knowledge...

How do we approach listening, as a mode of perception? How can we be attentive to what others say? Not so much to respond, but in order to understand. In today's episode,  On Listening , our guest is Mwenda Ntarangwi, a cultural anthropologist who has taught in the USA, in Kenya and is currently working with the National Defense University in Kenya.  Ntarangwi has explored questions of listeni...

This episode hosts two guests in a conversation about how dancing encompasses the elements of our changing worlds and allows us to act upon that world.  Hélène Neveu Kringelbach is an Associate Professor of African Anthropology at University College London. Her research has focused on the lives and works of dancers and musicians on migration and effective relationships by national and transnationa...

This episode "On Birth/ing" features Stephen Okumu Ombere, Professor of Anthropology at Maseno University in Kisumu, Kenya. Ombere has researched birth in relation to medicalization, social assistance programs, and various cultural practices related to giving birth and motherhood. He is author of two monographs: Socio-cultural Context of Circumcised Men's Sexual Behaviour in Kenya (2...

How and why are some things remembered and forgotten in different social and political contexts? Joining us on this episode, On Memory, is Jennifer Cole, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Human Development and Chair, Committee on African Studies, University of Chicago. Her work on Colonialism, rituals and ancestors in rural Madagascar has been centered on individual and collective mem...

How does intimacy matter in imagining and understanding the world today? Peter Geschiere, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, is our guest on this episode, “On Intimacy”. Geschiere is the author of seminal books, including Village Communities and the State: Changing Relations among the Maka of South-Eastern Cameroon (1982); The Modernity of Witchcraft (1997); The Per...

Larisa Jašarević, anthropologist and author of Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: Intimate Debt (2017) and of the forthcoming book Beekeeping in the End Times , is our guest in this episode, “On Death”. Jašarević holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, where, until recently, she has also been a Senior Lecturer, before moving back to her family’s village in Bosnia, where s...

This episode’s guest, Vaibhav Saria, is the author of Hijras, Lovers, Brother: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India (published in 2021), an impressively rich and nuanced ethnographic account of the everyday lives of hijras- often translated as one of India’s “trans” populations, how they subvert, play with and preserve and care for normative arrangements. Vaibhav Saria is Assistant Professor o...

In this episode, On Possibility , our guest Anand Pandian joins us virtually from Baltimore. Pandian's book, A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times (published in 2019) explores the possible in relation to knowledge, politics, and experience, but also—specifically—in relation to mundane acts of reading, writing, teaching, and researching. Guest: Anand Pandian is Professor and Chair in th...