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Ethnographic Imagination Basel

Basel Social Anthropology

Ethnographic Imagination Basel (EIB) – a series on reimagining the world from the mundane – is produced by the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. It is a research, educational, and public engagement initiative exploring innovative forms of political imagination through ethnographic practice. The podcast promotes ethnography not only as a tool of scholarly research but also as a mode of imagination available to all, a means for pursuing deeper intercultural, contextual understanding and more ethical ways of being in the world.

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Yesterday · 30 min
On Humor - with Mirco Göpfert
How can humor help us better grasp the world in which we live? In this episode, we explore how humour, comedy, parody and laughter are central to understanding political power today, with Mirco Göpfert, professor of social and cultural anthropology at Goethe University in Frankfurt. Göpfert’s body of work explores humour and satire, attending to the complex dissonances and absurdities of the political sphere. He examines humour and satire not only as epistemic practices but also, quite centrally, in relation to the anthropology of the state, bureaucratic practices, violence and security, crime, power, and resistance. Amongst his numerous articles are “Epistemophilic Obsessions: Espionage, Secrets and the Ethnographer's Will to Know”(2020), “Surveillance in Niger: Gendarmes and the Problem of `Seeing Things`”(2016), “Travelling Police: the Potential for Change in the Wake of Police Reform in West Africa (with Jan Beek)” (2015). This episode features discussions around his more recent work on humour, including articles such as “Dissonance: Cartooning in Iran” (2024), “Humor, and the Study of Things That Don't Match” (2022), “On dictators and clowns” (2020), “An Artistic Reaction to Perceived Injustice: Cartooning, Resistance and Textures of the Political in Iran” (2020). 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
June 23 · 32 min
On Bodies - with Sabine Mohamed
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 futures in East Africa and other regions. Her scholarship broadly addresses urbanism, infrastructure, borders, migration, ports, and trade, with a key focus on how bodies and race mediate conceptions of the future. Working primarily in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Germany, Mohamed's current book project ethnographically investigates the interconnections between blackness and experiences of urban and national dispossession. Her ongoing research traces the experiences of female laborers as they navigate economic exchange, Chinese investment, and resource extraction within the East African corridor. This work interrogates the complex intersections of labor, race, and gender. In parallel, she is engaged in a long-term project that examines Black feminist movements, sexualities, and practices of belonging in contemporary Germany. Her publications have appeared in a range of international and interdisciplinary journals, including Verge, Modern Africa,Tertium Comparationis, and New Writing, as well as in edited volumes, such as Disembodied Territories (2022) and Counter_Readings of the Body (2021) 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.
May 1 · 29 min
On Migration - with Charles Piot
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 migration within the context of the post-Cold War political economy of Togo in West Africa. Charles Piot is a professor of cultural anthropology, African and African American studies, and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University. His research focuses on the political economy of West Africa, addressing themes such as modernity, development, migration, diaspora, and the enduring impacts of colonialism in both rural and urban Togo. His recent ethnographic work examines how neoliberalism shapes emerging imaginaries of the future, particularly regarding aspirations for transnational mobility. He has authored several books, including Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999) and Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War (2010). In this episode, we will center our discussion on his book The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles (2019), co-authored with Kodjo Nicolas Batema, which received the 2020 Victor Turner Prize in ethnographic writing. 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.
March 16 · 30 min
On Endings - with Anne Allison
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 everyday life in the context of late capitalist, post-industrial Japan, and how changing configurations of family care and sociality in Japan sharply transform what is possible when it comes to dying. Among the key foci of her work are sexuality and maternal labor toys and comics youth and irregular workers as well as most recently practices of death and dying and his author of books such as Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994) Permitted and Prohibited Desires Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (2000) Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (2006), and Precarious Japan (2013). This episode focuses on her most recent book, Being Dead Otherwise, published by Duke University Press in 2023. A book that won the 2025 John Whitney Hall Book Prize. 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.
Nov 27, 2025 · 33 min
On Display - with Friedrich von Bose
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 research and curatorial practice. His academic and curatorial work has primarily focused on the political implications of display concerning colonialism, racism, and the future of anthropology museums. As a cultural anthropologist and former curator at the Humboldt Forum, von Bose has also served as a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology and Empirical Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich, concentrating on the History and Theory of Museum Ethics since 2023. Before this, he oversaw research and exhibitions at the three ethnological museums of the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony (State Art Collections Dresden): the Grassi Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig, the Museum of Ethnology Dresden, and the Ethnology Museum Herrnhut, where he was responsible for the long-term strategic development of research and exhibition programs. von Bose’s publications include: Researching Colonial Provenances. Final Report of the Project “Provenance of Colonial-Era Collections from Togo in the Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden and the GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig”, (2024) “Concerning curatorial practice in ethnological museums. An epistemology of postcolonial debate” in: Conal McCarthy, Philipp Schorch (Eds.): Curatopia. Museums and the future of curatorship (2019) Das Humboldt-Forum. Eine Ethnografie seiner Planung (2016) “The making of Berlin‘s Humboldt-Forum. Negotiating history and the cultural politics of place” (2013) 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.
Oct 15, 2025 · 29 min
On Extractivism - with Mark Goodale
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 green economies, and the long histories of extractivism in South America. His research encompasses law, human rights, politics, ideology, and long-term ethnographic studies in Bolivia, where his projects have examined government justice and recognition under Evo Morales' human rights activism. Goodale is the author of numerous books, such as Dilemmas of Modernity. Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (2008) Surrendering to Utopia. An Anthropology of Human Rights (2009), Anthropology and Law. A Critical Introduction (2017), A Revolution in Fragments. Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology and Practice in Bolivia (2019) and Reinventing Human Rights (2022) This episode focuses on Extracting the Future. Lithium in an Era of Energy Transition (2025), Goodale`s most recent book. 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.
Sep 29, 2025 · 29 min
On Plastics - with Brenda Chalfin
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) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.
Aug 18, 2025 · 31 min
On Immortality - with Abou Farman
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) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.
Jun 9, 2025 · 34 min
On Love - with Serena Owusua Dankwa
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
Apr 25, 2025 · 33 min
On Sensing - with David Howes
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
Mar 3, 2025 · 34 min
On the Devil - with Birgit Meyer
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) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel
Oct 31, 2024 · 32 min
On Erotics - with Anima Adjepong
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.
Sep 23, 2024 · 33 min
On Humanitarianism - with Inderpal Grewal
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.
Aug 13, 2024 · 32 min
On Trance - with Michaela Schäuble
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.
Jul 2, 2024 · 32 min
On Data - with Alec Bălăşescu
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.
May 16, 2024 · 35 min
On Surveillance - with Katherine Verdery
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 of culture and regimes of governance, secrecy, and surveillance. Verdery`s book, My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File (2018), which won the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, explores new ways to think about the relationship between surveillance, governance, and state power today. Some of Verdery`s other publications include What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (1996), The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (1999), The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania (2003) and Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police (2014). Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Production: Zainabu Jallo, Ann Karimi Kern (Institute of Social Anthropology) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel
Apr 26, 2024 · 28 min
On Materiality - with Carine Ayélé Durand
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 Director of Musée d'Ethnographie, Genève. Her curatorial and academic work involves collaborations with indigenous groups in the Arctic, the Brazilian Amazon and Canada to rethink engagements with material culture, visual arts, and museum exhibitions. Some of Durand’s essays include Artistic Practice and (Museum) Ethnography (2010); Anthropology in a Glass Case: Indigeneity, Collaboration, and Artistic Practice in Museums (2010); Indexing (In)Authenticity: Art and Artefact in Ethnography Museums (2012); and Redefining Curatorship as Skilled Practice (2023). Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Production: Zainabu Jallo, Ann Karimi Kern ( Institute of Social Anthropology) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.
Mar 11, 2024 · 33 min
On Diaspora - with Ghassan Hage
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 and expertise to this complex subject. In the recent book, The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World (2021), Hage explores innovative perspectives that challenge conventional notions of living in a lifeworld where the boundaries of location extend beyond mere spatial and temporal distances. Hage, a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, has published a vast number collection of works, including White Nation (1998); Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003); After-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination (2015); and Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (2017). #diaspora #migration #ethnographicimaginationbasel #anthropology Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Production: Zainabu Jallo, Ann Karimi Kern (Institute of Social Anthropology) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel
S1 · E8
Sep 15, 2023 · 32 min
On Listening–with Mwenda Ntarangwi
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 listening, perception, and its engagement in knowledge production across his work in Kenya and the USA. Some of his publications include Gender Identity and Performance: Understanding of Swahili Cultural Realities Through Songs (2003); East African Hip Hop: Youth Culture and Globalization (2009), Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology (2010), and The Street is My Pulpit: Hip Hop and Christianity in Kenya (2016). Our conversation focuses on his article “Listening to Disrupt Ethnographic Representations” (2021), published in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Host: George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Production: Ethnographic Imagination Basel: Zainabu Jallo, Ann Karimi Kern (Ethnologisches Seminar Universität Basel) in collaboration with the New Media Center #listening #ethnographicimaginationbasel #anthropology #baselsocialanthropology
S1 · E7
Aug 21, 2023 · 41 min
On Dance–with Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Lesley Nicole Braun
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 transnational families in Senegal and France. Kringelbach is author of Dance Circles: Movement Morality and Self-fashioning in Urban Senegal (2013). Lesley Braun, Associate Researcher at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basel and has worked among women concert dancers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Braun's research explores dance, gender, transnational mobility in women's sexuality and trade in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She is author of Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa (2023). Host: George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. Production: Ethnographic Imagination Basel: Zainabu Jallo, Ann Karimi Kern (Ethnologisches Seminar Universität Basel) in collaboration with the New Media Center #dance #senegal #congo #DRC #ethnographicimaginationbasel #anthropology

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