Publications related to Cultural anthropology

Impromptu Conservation – Unveiling Huế's Mnemonic Sites: Heritagization, (de)Colonization, and Place-making

This dissertation interrogates postcolonial cities’ syncretic territories, using Huế’s mnemonic sites – historically and culturally significant locales that aid in remembrance – to explore displaced communities’ cohabitation tactics and decolonization effo ...

EPFL2023

Platform-mediated live musical performance in China: New social practices and urban cultural spaces

Mengke Zhang

This paper provides a non-Anglo-American geographical discussion of digitally mediated cultural activities. Taking China's live music industry as an entry point, we seek to theoretically and empirically understand the complex roles of digital technologies ...

2023

The Advent of the Sharing Culture and its Effect on Product Pricing

Thomas Alois Weber, Maryam Razeghian Jahromi

Empirical observations suggest that consumers' propensity towards sharing varies with culture and the individuals' socio-demographic characteristics. In an economy with overlapping generations of heterogeneous consumers, we study optimal dynamic selling by ...

2019

The institutional challenges of scaling-up housing retrofit: the Swiss cities of Basel and Sion

Eghbal Arian Mahzouni

Purpose This paper aims to discuss the nexus between two societal (sub) systems of housing and energy supply to shed new light on the key institutional barriers to socio-technical energy transition in the built environment. The key research question is to ...

EMERALD GROUP PUBLISHING LTD2019

Urbaniser la campagne : la Chine, entre croissance massive et réalité du territoire

Marlène Audrey Bertille Leroux

The primary goal of this research is to undertake an analytical study addressing the urbanisation of rural areas as a major territorial, environmental and cultural challenge. The new relations that have developed between urban and rural areas clearly signa ...

EPFL2017

Moral Matrices : Space Through the Unfolding of Direct Democracy in Switzerland

Shin Alexandre Koseki

In this dissertation, I address the political and moral geography of Swiss federal participatory votes for the period between 1981 and 2014 to re-investigate some of the fundamental questions left open in urban sciences: how and why socio-ethical, moral an ...

EPFL2017

Sustainable Architecture for Educational Space in Africa and China

Ning Liu

Countries in the Global South are producing the most important educational needs of the 21st century. Fast-growing cities can provide the most striking examples of these current tendencies. Just over a decade after the start of the new millennium, the need ...

EPFL2015

Multidisciplinary design of suitable assistive technologies for motor disabilities in Colombia

Ricardo Andres Chavarriaga Lozano

raumatic or pathological brain lesions often result in motor disabilities that have strong personal and social effects. Assistive technologies can support this population, potentially improving their autonomy and promoting their participation in society. H ...

2014

Creativity without critique: An inquiry into the aesthetization of alternative culture

Luca Giovanni Pattaroni, Yves Pedrazzini, Mischa-Sébastien Piraud, Letícia Cabeçadas Do Carmo

Based on a research in Lisbon, Geneva and Ljubljana, this paper aim to analyse the uses of the term “alternative” (along its formal and aesthetic registers) in order to tackle the question of the aesthetization of creativity, away from its critical dimensi ...

2014

Cultural System or norm circles? An exchange

This article takes the form of a debate between the two authors on the social ontology of propositional culture. Archer applies the morphogenetic approach, analysing culture as a cycle of interaction between the Cultural System and Socio-Cultural Interacti ...

2012

Verso un'oggettività della bellezza. L'insegnamento dei Grigioni

Stefano Zerbi, Luca Conti, Marco Svimbersky

Contemporary society is based on a perpetual evolution of personal opinions and likings. The transmission of knowledge is questioned, but if the education and teaching about a critical vision is considered an essential instrument, so the schools and the ma ...

2010

Rencontre de la science de l'information géographique et de l'anthropologie culturelle : modélisation spatiale et représentation de phénomènes culturels

Abram Pointet

Geographical Information Science and Cultural Anthropology are aimed to collaborate on development projects dedicated to indigenous communities. This fact is first based on a growing intention to integrate the reality and the perception of the development ...

EPFL2007

John-Théodore -alias Jack- Cornaz (1886-1974) : un architecte à contre-jour

Nadja Maillard

On November the 14th 1974, Jack Cornaz died in Lausanne, the town where he was born in 1886. This study traces the unusual career of this architect – a singular figure in the field of Swiss-French architecture of the twentieth century – whose name, from th ...

EPFL2005