Reading Others

May 22-23, 2025

Tanja Luchsinger, UZH

Prof. Johannes Quack, UZH

Prof. Mayanthi Fernando, University of California, USA

Dr. Katyayani Dalmia, independent researcher in Delhi, India

Everyday life is shaped by our evaluation of others: we "read" others' bodies even in the briefest encounters in public space– through their dressing and speech; facial features, skin color and hair; smell and scent; through what they eat and how. We thus discern and situate people along axes such as gender, class, race, religion, national identity, caste and ethnicity. But the process of "reading others" is not identical the world over, figured as it is by which differences are pivotal in different cultures: is religion a key marker or race? Caste or ethnicity? How are each of these stereotyped through bodily traits and habits? How do they come together: for instance, in which cultures is religion treated as race? How are these distinctions gendered? And on the other side of reading difference, what are the strategies that people use to foreground, underplay or conceal aspects of their selves? 

In this module, we explore how anthropology can study difference, with particular attention to the potential of ethnographic methods for going beyond abstract categories to lived experiences of difference. We will consider how social distinctions come up in individual research projects, attending to the political geographies that they are located in.

"Reading others" in this module is two-fold, as we are also interested in the interpretive process of ethnography: how does the ethnographer study how variously positioned individuals experience difference and marginalization? How does this relate to the classifications that the ethnographer herself is familiar with in her home context: what translations does the ethnographer thus need to make, as well as suspend? Conversely, how are ethnographers themselves read by their interlocutors in the field? Workshop participants will engage these questions in their research projects through working with anthropologists attentive to multiple forms of difference in their scholarship.

Invited expert:

Mayanthi Fernando is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests include Islam and secularism; human-nonhuman entanglements; more-than-secular multispecies ecologies; histories of the body and consciousness; liberalism and law; and gender and sexuality. She is the author of The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke, 2014), which took Muslim French pious practice and civic activism as a lens to examine the contours of laïcité. She is also co-editor of Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader (Duke, 2021), which gathers together the work of the pioneering Haitian anthropologist and historian of the West. She is finishing a second book, Beyond the Anthroposecular, on secularity and the Anthropocene. She has held residential fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, and has published in a wide array of academic journals and non-academic venues.

Schloss Überstorf, FR

Participation fee: CHF 60 

For students of the CUSO universities (Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel and Fribourg) and from the universities of Bern, Zürich, Luzern, Basel and St. Gallen, accommodation and meals are organised and covered by the CUSO doctoral program in anthropology. 

Travel expenses will be reimbursed via MyCUSO based on half-fare train ticket (2nd class) from the student's university to the place of the activity.

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