Short bio

Since my first fieldwork, I have been interested in the possibilities of working as a social anthropologist in Europe. Through my ethnography with seminomadic Sinti family networks in the Italian Alps I engaged with the challenge of doing research with people notoriously skeptical towards researchers and the documentation of their everyday practices. My monograph (Tauber 2014 [2006]) is the first to have analyzed the phenomenon of flight marriage, bringing it together with the spiritual presence of the ancestors. Currently I am in the process of establishing a new research network, looking at global issues of environment, climate change, gender, human-non-human relationships affecting the Eastern Alps.
As a co-founder of MFEA my aim is also at revitalizing alpine anthropology.

 

Main Research Areas

Anthropology of movement and nomadism;
Sinti in the Alps, Romani people in Europe;
Begging economies and theories of the gift;
Anthropology and History – time and mnemonic practices;
Relations to an with land in the European Alps;
Anthropology of the state and public institutions