Ethnographic Imagination Basel

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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