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Martin Saxer studied social and cultural anthropology in Zurich and taught visual anthropology at Zurich University’s Ethnographic Museum. In 2010, he obtained his doctorate from Oxford University on a Clarendon scholarship with a thesis on the industrialization of Tibetan medicine. Outside of academia, he worked in carpentry, as a gardener, as a theater actor and director of two plays, and in a stained-glass atelier.
From 2011 to 2015, he was a postdoc at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore and a Marie-Curie Fellow at LMU Munich, working on his project “Neighbouring China.” Between 2015 and 2020, Martin was leading the research project “Remoteness & Connectivity—Highland Asia in the World,” funded by an ERC Starting Grant. Since 2022, he is the principle investigator of the current ERC Consolidator Grant project “Foraging at the Edge of Capitalism.”
A wanderer between arts and academia, Martin directed and produced three feature length documentary films. The latest, “Murghab,” premiered internationally at the Locarno International Film Festival. He ran the photography blog [the other image], curated the exhibition “Highland Flotsam,” and created several photographic exhibitions of his own work.
RCC Research Project: Foraging at the Edge of Capitalism
Selected Publications:
- Places in Knots: Remoteness and Connectivity in the Himalayas and Beyond. Cornell University Press, 2022.
- edited with Philipp Schorch, and Marlen Elders. Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond. UCL Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787357488.
- with Ruben Andersson. “The Return of Remoteness: Insecurity, Isolation, and Connectivity in the New World Disorder.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale 27, no. 2 (2019): 140–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12652.
- edited with Alexander Horstmann, and Alessandro Rippa. Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands. Routledge, 2018.
- with Juan Zhang. The Art of Neighbouring: Making Relations Across China’s Borders. Amsterdam University Press, 2017.
- Manufacturing Tibetan Medicine: The Creation of An Industry and the Moral Economy of Tibetanness. Berghahn, 2013.