Ethnographic Imagination Basel

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 (2015) and Local Perceptions of Social Protection Schemes in Maternal Health in Kenya: Ethnography in Coastal Kenya (PhD dissertation at the University of Bern, 2018). Stephen has also authored and co-authored articles applying a medical anthropology perspective to a wide variety of topics, including circumcision, HIV/AIDS, maternal health, and children’s vulnerability to sexual abuse.

Host: George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.

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 memories. Some of her publications include Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar (University of California Press 2001), Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future in Madagascar (University of Chicago Press, 2010)

Host: George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.

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Ethnographic Imagination Basel: Zainabu Jallo, Ann Karimi Kern (Ethnologisches Seminar Universität Basel) 

in collaboration with the New Media Center

#memory #madagascar #ethnographicimaginationbasel #anthropology

How does intimacy matter in imagining and understanding the world today?

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:

#intimacy #experience #imagination #anthropology #ethnographicimaginationbasel #basel

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 she now works and writes by an apiary. 

This episode's discussion begins with death, spanning related themes such as Islamic eschatology, eco-eschatology and some sensibilities they evoke. #death #islam #islamiceschatology #faith #eschatology

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:

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 of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Holding a PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University, Vaibhav’s research and teaching span a wide array of topics, including global health and medical anthropology; gender, sexuality, and kinship; panics, pandemics, and poverty; questions of ethics, violence, law and nationalism.

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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 the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to A Possible Anthropology, the book around which our conversation will focus today, he is author of Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (2009); Ayya’s Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India (2014) and Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation (2015). Anand is also editor and co-editor of numerous volumes, and his research has spanned across a wide variety of topics from environmental ethics, ecological sensibility, and agrarian cultivation to film, art, and music, to ways of doing anthropology with an “open mind”—with an eye out for possibility.

Host: George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.

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