PD Dr. Martin Saxer

Martin Saxer was the Munich project lead of a study on vulnerabilities in the current pandemic, carried out in the EU-funded research network Sonar-Global (sonar-global.eu). Martin was a Clarendon scholar at Oxford and received his doctorate in 2010. He was a postdoc at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore and a Marie Curie Research Fellow at LMU Munich. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant ("Remoteness & Connectivity: Highland Asia in the World", 2015-2020, www.highlandasia.net) and an ERC Consolidator Grant for his project "Foraging at the Edge of Capitalism", starting in January 2022. In 2021, he was admitted to the Heisenberg Programme. Martin conducted extensive fieldwork in Siberia, Tibet and Nepal since 2003. He directed three feature length documentary films. His latest film, Murghab (www.murghabfilm.com), premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2019 and was awarded the price for the best documentary feature at the Dumbo Film Festival in New York City.

RCC Research Project: Foraging at the Edge of Capitalism

Selected Publications:

• Places in Knots: Remoteness and Connectivity in the Himalayas and Beyond. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2021.
• with  Philipp Schorch. “Materiality and Connectivity.” In Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond, edited by Philipp Schorch, Martin Saxer, and Marlen Elders, 1–14. London: UCL Press, 2020. 
• with Ruben Andersson.  “The Return of Remoteness: Insecurity, Isolation and Connectivity in the New World Disorder.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 27 (2): 140–55, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12652.
• with Juan Zhang. The Art of Neighbouring. Making Relations Across China’s Borders. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017.
• with Alessandro Rippa. “Mong La: Business as Usual in the ChinaMyanmar Borderlands.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, no. 19: 240–52 (2016). https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-19/mong-la/essay.
• “The Journeys of Tibetan Medicine.” In Bodies in Balance. The Art of Tibetan Medicine, 246–56. New York: Rubin Museum of Art in association with Washington University Press, 2014.