Anthropology Lecture Series

Renewable Energy Development on post-mined lands: risks and opportunities for a fair just transition

Presentation date: October 22, 2024

Abstract: This research investigates the social and environmental problems emerging from the conversion of closed mines into renewable energy hubs (such as solar parks and wind turbines). Socially, this research seeks to understand the potential impacts such transitions have on communities living nearer to targeted mines. It seeks to answer the following questions: Are local communities involved in decision-making? What are the likely social impacts of such a transition especially for surrounding communities? What can be done to minimize social impacts? Environmentally, it seeks to answer the following questions: What are the environmental impacts associated with the conversion of closed mines into RET hubs? To what extent can environmental impacts worsen the social outcomes of such processes? To answer these questions, this research investigates the social and environmental impacts of the conversion of coal mines into RET hubs in Lusatia (eastern Germany) and Old Manheim (western Germany).

Erwachsenes Sein gestalten: Handlungsautonomie und Eingebundenheit in einer spezifischen Lebensphase (in Togo und Benin). Habilitationsvortrag aus dem Fach Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie

Presentation date: October 29, 2024

Abstract: Das Erwachsenenalter wurde lange Zeit als normaler Zustand des Menschseins betrachtet, aber nur selten explizit thematisiert. Mit einer neuen Perspektive auf das Handeln von Erwachsenen zeigt die Vortragende, wie der Umgang mit Diskontinuitäten zentrales Erfordernis in dieser Altersphase ist.

In Togo und Benin wurden in einer mikroökonomischen Studie ein Jahr lang die materiellen Transaktionen und Fürsorgeleistungen von 80 Erwachsenen in drei Dörfern untersucht. Ergänzt durch qualitative Daten aus Forschungsaufenthalten von 2006 bis 2023 zielt die Studie auf eine Konzeptualisierung des Erwachsenenalters in der sozialanthropologischen Forschung.

Zentrale Themen sind ökonomische Interaktionen und die Gestaltung von Beziehungen durch materielle Zuwendungen. Ferner werden anhand von dichter Teilnahme soziale Transformationsprozesse angesichts des Todes der älteren Generationen aufgezeigt. Abschließend fokussiert die vorgestellte Studie anhand von exemplarischen Biographien, wie Entscheidungsfindungen in als erwachsen definierten Lebensbereichen den relationalen Prozess des erwachsenen Seins erst ermöglichen. Erwachsenes Sein manifestiert sich prozesshaft in einem Spannungsfeld von Autonomie und sozialer Eingebundenheit.

Contested Sovereignty: Builders, Planners, Dwellers and the Making of Nairobi

Presentation date: November 5, 2024

Abstract: The paper takes the lead from the recent substantial investments by Chinese companies in building urban infrastructure in Kenya. Since the early 2000s, a multiplicity of businesses from China have thrived in the construction market in Nairobi. This has brought significant changes in the ways the city is planned, built, and lived. In the paper, I’ll explore the effects of China’s financial engagement in Kenya from the perspective of city building, asking which kinds of contested visions of the city may emerge.

By relating questions of governance, citizenship, and, ultimately, sovereignty, I will show how China-built urban infrastructure in Nairobi not only divides the Kenyan urban middle class but also promotes different agendas among ‘Chinese actors’. It argues for the necessity of nuanced and careful differentiations among stakeholders and that the domains of governance and sovereignty are not in operation simply at the level of the nation-state, which keeps being eroded by sovereign debt and government-to-government loans. Rather, ultimately, the scale of the city offers new vistas to the powers at work to produce visions of the future, which are often different from those that urban dwellers imagine and aspire to.

Pharmaceutical Necrosocialities: The Life-Death Worlds of Sodium Pentobarbital

Presentation date: November 12, 2024

Abstract: Originally synthesised in the 1930s as a sedative and sleeping aid, sodium pentobarbital (SP) gained popularity as a widely used barbiturate but soon became associated with numerous accidental overdoses and suicides. As awareness of its dangers grew, SP was largely replaced by benzodiazepines, which carried a lower risk of overdose and addiction. Despite this, SP continues to be used in medical settings, particularly for treating epilepsy and other conditions. Paradoxically, it is precisely its high overdose potential that makes SP the drug of choice for death-inducing procedures, including assisted dying in Switzerland and lethal injections in the U.S. This transformation highlights SP’s shift from a medical tool to a substance primarily valued for its lethality. This talk explores the life-death worlds of SP, analysing how its life-cycle intersects with historically and culturally situated forms of governance and emerging necrosocialities. The global circulation and local applications of SP reveal three critical tensions that underpin the life-death worlds of SP. First, as a pharmakon, SP embodies the dual potential to both kill and heal, emphasising its ambivalent role as a life-saving drug in medical contexts and a death-inducing agent in assisted dying and state executions. Second, there is the tension between SP as a commodity—shaped by market dynamics, legal loopholes, and varying levels of regulation—and its status as a controlled substance, whose distribution and use are tightly regulated or even criminalised in certain contexts. Third, the tension between voluntary and coerced uses of SP, where it facilitates individual agency in assisted dying but also serves as a tool of state power and punishment in executions, reflects broader socio-political dynamics of choice versus control. These competing forces of choice and control, care and punishment, highlight SP’s ambivalence and its entanglement in the social, political, and cultural negotiations of life and death.

Living with few things. The use of photos in anthropological research. 

Presentation date: November 19, 2024

Abstract: A Kel Ewey Tuareg owns about 130 things. Based on more than 30 years of field research among the Kel Ewey of Timia, Gerd Spittler examines how the Tuareg deal with their objects. Three hundred of my photographs complement the presentation.

In my talk I will concentrate on the use of photos in anthropological research: how the photos are presented to and received by the Tuareg, readers of the book, students, public conferences.

Worlding Doing Family - GBTIQ+ Parented Families in Switzerland

Presentation date: November 26, 2024

Abstract: In Switzerland, ideas about what constitutes a family are highly normative. The dominant image depicts
families as consisting of two white, middle-class, heterosexual, cis-gender, able-bodied, presumably
monogamous parents with genetic ties to their children. In this presentation, we focus on men whose
parenting is contested because they fall outside of this hegemonic family norm, namely GBTIQ+ parents
(gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, queer, and others who do not identify as heterosexual and/or as cisgender
but do not fit into the above categories). Through listening to the voices of parents who are
often unheard, we aim to illuminate the diverse possibilities of family formation and ‘doing family’
(Jurczyk, 2014; Morgan, 2011), to show how such parents contribute to the worlding of more diverse
family norms. Using the examples of five parents living in different family constellations, with whom we
conducted in-depth biographical interviews, we address the following questions: How do GBTIQ+
parents understand, experience, negotiate, and enact ‘doing family’ within social, legal, political, and
economic structures geared towards cis-heterosexual, two-parent families. In what ways do they
challenge, (de)stabilise, and reinforce hegemonic family norms? How does their ‘doing family’
contribute to worlding families?

Regenerating Kinship: Intimate Encounters and the (Re)Making of ‘New Worlds’ in Canada’s Climate Crisis

Presentation date: December 10, 2024

Migration, Religion and Christian Assistance Work at Europe's Southern Frontier Zone: Mobility Governance from a Translocal Approach

Presentation date: January 7, 2025

Abstract: Due to their role as Europe’s frontier regions, migration flows from and within North African and Sahelian countries have attracted particular scholarly interest. Existing literature predominantly emphasizes the role of state actors and European interests in migration governance. While the influence of national African and (European) states in migration processes and their regulation is undeniably important, this top-down perspective tends to obscure the contributions of other actors involved in regulating migration flows. Drawing on initial exploratory ethnographic research conducted in Senegal and Morocco, this paper will examine the extent to which Catholic charitable institutions engage in governing vulnerable migrants in these settings. It will explore the connection between Christian humanitarian work, bureaucracy and migration governance, as well as the social and political implications of the Christian identity of these institutions in these predominantly Muslim settings.

The Transformation of Kin Networks through Separation and Estrangement

Presentation date: January 14, 2025

Abstract: Intimate relations, defined by mutual care, trust and love, are fundamental to all human societies and have been widely studied by social anthropologists. These relationships form part of the continuum of social commitment that have gained attention in New Kinship Studies (NKS), with its focus on the interactions that create and sustain them, thereby emphasising relatedness through interaction rather than procreative connections. This shift is largely inspired by David Schneider's work, which prioritises the "kinning" of others through interactions that bespeak and demonstrate intimacy. While NKS has focused on the creation and maintenance of intimate relations, our research explores interactions that result in the transformation or termination of such relations, on what we take to be the reasonable assumption that the anthropology of kinship needs to take account of both the procreative relations between people and the sociological trajectories that can sustain or erode intimate relations. We conduct three empirical studies: estrangement between parents and adult children in Switzerland, marriage dissolution in the Philippines, and first parents’ separation after adoption in Russia. Our research addresses foundational issues for NKS, arguing that procreation as well as caregiving efforts and their effects are foundational to understanding estrangement processes, precisely because sociological profiles cannot "end" kin relations and the networks they set up. The aim of our research is to show what makes it impossible to "undo" kin relations and trace the ripple effects of attempts to do so have on the kin networks. Thus, and to put it plainly, one can, for example, terminate all direct interaction with one's birth-mother, but one cannot, by an act of will, negate the effects of that termination on one's siblings, children and other kin; nor can one negate the effects of the power of the state acting on its own interpretations of motherhood.

© Photographer: Kirsten van Santen

Africa Redux. (Re)Considering the making of knowledge

Presentation date: January 21, 2025

Abstract: In the study of Africa, there is a tendency towards studying social problems, health concerns and political conflict. And for good reasons. Economic, political and cultural hardships are important to understand the complex fundamental contradictions, interdependencies and ambiguities that characterize the social fabric. Yet, this tendency also provides food for thought about the way research agendas are organized and which epistemologies inform them. Through the research topics of the middle class, marriage and sexuality I unravel dominant structures of thinking, exemplified in terms such as neoliberalism, patriarchy, and sexual violence. In this paper, I tease out a) what Foucault called “problematizations, that is, how and why something becomes a problem in the first place, and b) what is left out of such analyses and the resulting flawed production of knowledge. Ultimately, the formation of knowledge tells us more about us researchers than about the people we study. (Re)Turning towards mundane realities provides a critique of critical thinking and the obligations of representation.

Electoral participation in the digital age in Benin: analysis of the practices of illiteracised people

Presentation date: February 4, 2025

Abstract: At the end of the 2010s, Benin embarked on digitalizing the public services, which began with the instalment of the permanent computerized electoral register. This initiative has gained momentum in recent years, with the creation, from 2020 onwards, of numerous platforms to offer almost all public services. Since then, digitalization seems to be affecting almost every sector of activity and citizens' daily lives. It is the framework of widespread digitalization that the last four major elections (communal and municipal legislative and presidential elections in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023) have been organized. However, despite the political will to ensure citizens' effective participation in the exercise of their civic rights, experimentation with digitalization has given rise to the emergence of forms of fractures in participation. What can we make of this experiment in the early stages of digitalization of the electoral process? How can citizens - particularly those who have difficulty with the written word - experience that process? This paper presents an analysis of the electoral process, highlighting not only the stakes and challenges but also the paradoxes engendered by the digitalization of citizen participation in public life in Benin.