Presentation

Jean Chamel is an anthropologist and Senior SNSF Researcher at the University of Lausanne. In 2018, he defended his thesis in Religious Studies that examines the discourses and practices of the precursors of the theories of collapse ("collapsologie") in French-speaking Europe. After focusing on the global movement for the rights of nature that promote the attribution of legal personality to non-human entities, with the invention of ritual practices connecting humans and other-than-human persons, his current research is the ethnography of the rearrangements of the sensitive, ritualized, and aesthetic relationships with the high Alpine mountains in the time of climate change, rockfalls and glacier melting. He has taught at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, the University of Lausanne and the UNAM in Mexico City, and has been a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability (CaoS, University College London) and at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (LMU, Munich).