Complicity and Antagonism
Anthropological Views of Geneva

Edited by Alessandro Monsutti, Françoise Grange Omokaro, Philippe Gazagne and Sandro Cattacin

With Savannah Dodd, Juliana Ghazi, Victoria Gronwald, Sarah Hayes, Aditya Kakati, Samira Marty, Linda Peterhans, Dagna Rams, Rosie Sims and drawings by Heather Suttor

2017, numéro 26

ISBN: 978-2-940386-35-2

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Since the beginning of the twentieth century, social diversity and its consequences have attracted the attention of anthropologists and sociologists with urban life as their object of study. Focusing on Geneva, a unique laboratory for studying cities and migration, this volume brings together texts and drawings produced by students of the Master of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. It focuses on the social dynamics observed during the spring semester 2014 in the weekly market in Les Grottes, a gaming hall in Plainpalais, the Sentier des Saules in the Jonction neighbourhood, a Lebanese restaurant not far from the main train station, or during a guided walking tour in the street of Les Pâquis. Through small everyday life stories and fine-grained descriptions, the various authors evoke places, people and atmospheres without skipping over their intellectual and ethical doubts. One of the ethnographic approach’s richnesses becomes clear in the reading: emotion and loyalty within a relationship, far from being obstacles, are valuable heuristic tools, a research method that allows little facts, gleaned almost at random, to become significant. The fluid style adopted in this collective work reflects the characteristics of the object being studied. Via their distant gaze, the contributors show how diversity is experienced in the form of movement. They also reveal the place of subtle, micro-political logic in a public staging of belonging, in the appropriation of areas, in various profiles highlighting in turn their origin, genre, class and intersectional organisation within the public sphere.