Jean Chamel | Presentation

Research interests

Environmental anthropology
Anthropology of glaciers and icy mountains
More-than-human relations
Extinction, loss and mourning
Animism and animacy
Geopower
Ritual creativity and alternative spiritualities
Rights of nature
End-of-the-world imaginaries and collapsology
Europe and Alps

About

Jean Chamel (PhD in Anthropology of Religions, University of Lausanne, 2018) is an anthropologist and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Geography and Sustainability (IGD) of the University of Lausanne, where he is a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mountain Research (CIRM). His ethnographic research asks how people in Western societies relate to non-human entities in times of ecological crisis, from the end-of-the-world imaginaries of environmentalist networks to the grief, wonder and care that surround vanishing Alpine glaciers.

He has held research positions at University College London, the Rachel Carson Center (LMU Munich), the Colegio de San Luis Potosí (Mexico) and the University of Geneva, and has combined research and teaching at the National Museum of Natural History and CNRS (Paris) and at the University of Lausanne. He also taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

His doctoral thesis received the Faculty Prize for the best thesis of the year (Faculty of Theology and Study of Religions, University of Lausanne, 2018). He is qualified as Assistant Professor (Maître de conférences, Section 20, Ethnology) by the French National Council of Universities, and was co-winner of the Foundation for Social Sciences Award (Paris, 2020). He is a member of the IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy and a scientific partner of the Geneva Ethnographic Museum.

Before turning to anthropology, he trained as an engineer (Arts et Métiers ECAM, Lyon) and earned a Master's degree in Development Studies at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. He worked for UN agencies in Geneva and Rome, specialising in skills development in international cooperation and in the analysis of global environmental and sustainability policy.

Current research

Extinctions. Living with the Disappearance of Non-Human Entities in the Alps (SNSF project grant, 2025–2028)

Since 2025, Jean Chamel has been co-investigator of Extinctions, a four-year SNSF project directed by Prof. Laine Chanteloup. Drawing on extinction studies, the project follows the transformations of human and non-human ways of living in mountain areas through two case studies: the decline of mountain galliformes and the acceleration of glacier melt. Within a two-year position on the project, he leads the glacier case study.

On the glaciers, his fieldwork follows how mountaineers, guides, glaciologists, crystal hunters and others watch the retreat and "darkening" of ice and rework their attachments to it. It builds on an exploratory ethnography in the high Alps (SNSF Retour CH fellowship, 2021–2022) and on Living Mountains (SNSF Spark grant, 2023–2025), which tested whether a form of Western animism can be found in people's lived experience of mountains.

Building on this work, he is now developing a line of research on geopower, the power of and over the geological. It asks how societies manage, exploit and protect icy mountains, how these mountains act in turn and are perceived as animate (animacy), and which conflicts among humans arise around them.

In 2024, he co-founded glaciers ardents with the late Nicolas Nova. It is a collective that organises participatory gatherings at the foot of Alpine glaciers, where participants from varied backgrounds share their experiences of, and relations with, these threatened entities. Six editions have been held: the Bossons and Trient glaciers (2024), the Mer de Glace and the tracks of the Rhône glacier in Geneva (2025), the Miage glacier and the Glacier des Bois (2026). The collective has grown into an informal research network that includes doctoral candidates working on relations between societies and glaciers.

Since 2021, he has also collaborated with artists, writers and filmmakers on the transformation of high mountains. Projects include the cycle Enquêter avec d'autres êtres with philosopher Vinciane Despret (University of Lausanne and Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne); a year of exchanges with author Ed Wige, supported by Pro Helvetia ("Fragments of Ice"), which led to her book How Do Glaciers Die (Mégafeux, 2026); and contributions to films and performances by Camille Llobet, Thomas Benard and Charlotte Qin. His work has been covered by Le Monde, the Huffington Post, RTS, Heidi.news and Reuters, among others, and presented in public lectures at Club 44 (La Chaux-de-Fonds) and the Geneva Society of Arts.

Previous research

Collapsology and the end of a world (PhD, 2012–2018). Jean Chamel's doctoral research was an ethnography of informal networks of mutual acquaintance among environmentalist intellectuals in France and Switzerland. It showed that collapse thinking is less a belief in the end of the world than in the end of a world, together with a call for a non-dualist, non-anthropocentric relation to the world shared with alternative spiritualities. Through participant observation, it described the rituals and exercises of reconnection with the living of "The Work that Reconnects". The results appeared in articles in Terrain, the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture and Ethnologie française, and in his 2024 book.

Rights of nature and ritual creativity (postdoctoral fellowships, 2018–2021). Funded by SNSF mobility fellowships hosted in Paris (National Museum of Natural History and CNRS), London (University College London) and Munich (Rachel Carson Center), he followed European networks promoting the rights of nature and their ceremonies of "reconnection" with the entities they defend, such as water ceremonies. This work opened a field of study on ritual creativity with more-than-humans, and the question of whether a Western form of animism is possible. After two international panels he co-organised (IUAES 2019, EASA 2020), he co-edited with Yael Dansac Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality in a Living World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), whose nine case studies range from West Africa and Mexico to Nepal, Siberia and Europe.

Selected publications

Monograph

Chamel, J. (2024). Fin du monde et effondrement de soi. Enquête aux racines de la collapsologie. Grenoble: UGA Éditions. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.ugaeditions.35601

Edited book

Chamel, J. and Dansac, Y., eds. (2022). Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality in a Living World. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3

Articles and book chapters

Roux, S. and Chamel, J. (2026). "Living the End of Beauty: Threatened Landscapes and the Politics of Aesthetic Emotions." American Anthropologist 128(3): 607–617. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.70102

Chamel, J. (2023). "Mourning Glaciers: Animism Reconsidered through Ritual and Sensorial Relationships with Mountain Entities in the Alps." Humans 3(4): 239–250. https://doi.org/10.3390/humans3040019

Chamel, J. (2023). "L'écospiritualité : se relier aux êtres de la Terre." Ethnologie française 53(1): 37–51. https://doi.org/10.3917/ethn.231.0037

Chamel, J. (2022). "Ritual Animism: Indigenous Performances, Interbeings Ceremonies and Alternative Spiritualities in the Global Rights of Nature Networks." In Relating with More-than-Humans, eds. J. Chamel and Y. Dansac, 137–161. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10294-3_7

Chamel, J. (2021). "Waiting for the Ecological Apocalypse: From New Age Millenarianism to Collapsologie in French-Speaking Europe." Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 15(4): 441–461. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.18703

Chamel, J. (2019). "Faire le deuil d'un monde qui meurt. Quand la collapsologie rencontre l'écospiritualité." Terrain 71: 68–85. https://doi.org/10.4000/terrain.18101

Chamel, J. (2019). "Relational Ecologists Facing 'the End of a World': Inner Transition, Ecospirituality, and the Ontological Debate." In Indigenous Perceptions of the End of the World: Creating a Cosmopolitics of Change, ed. R. Bold, 161–181. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13860-8_8

The full list of publications is available on the publications page.