Ph.D. Ethnology and Anthropology, University of Neuchâtel/Switzerland; Practical School of Higher Studies/Paris, France, April 2005

Postgraduate Diploma in Ethnology and Anthropology, University of Neuchâtel, 2000

M.A. University of Neuchâtel, Ethnology, French Literature and Linguistics, June 1998 B.A. University of Neuchâtel, Ethnology, French Literature and Linguistics, Journalism, 1994-5

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2009-present

Postdoctoral Fellow, Swiss National Science Foundation (SNFS), 2005-2009

Visiting Scholar at the Anthropology Department (UAF), 2005-2009

Religious anthropology, Modes of ritualization, Hunting/herding/fishing practices and ideologies, Ritual efficacy, Sacrifice, Symbolic and cognitive anthropology, Ethnography, Russian Far East, Central & Eastern Europe

I truly enjoy mentoring students. I am happy to advise students on their research projects and to facilitate fieldworks in Kamchatka/Russian Far East, in Alaska, and in the ex-Soviet Block. I try to provide mentorship in grant writing and to develop a dynamic and reflexive approach to ethnographic fieldwork with students. At an institutional level, I have recently initiated an agreement between the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) in order to facilitate student exchanges and to offer the opportunity to study abroad.

Courses I offer at UAF in 2009-2010 include: Kinship and Social Organization, Structures of Anthropological Arguments, Fundamentals of Social/Cultural Anthropology, Research Design and Professional Development Seminar. Additional courses I have offered at UAF include “Re-Presenting Rituals in the Russian North” and “The Anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss” (with David Koester).

NEWREL (New religious movements in the Russian North: competing uses of religiosity after socialism) is concerned with the full variety of religious phenomena that has flourished in the Russian North since glasnost’. My own Associated Project analyzes forms of popular religiosity in rural areas of Northern Kamchatka that are under Christian influence (Russian Orthodoxy, Protestant Evangelism) by comparing them with other forms that have developed out of any external religious control. My intermediary conclusion is that, far from devastating the creative forms of religiosities elaborated since the turn of the 18th century, Evangelical activism (and the resistance to it) contributed to revitalize village communities after the predicament of the 1990s. Without neglecting the tensions and the conflicts that followed the Evangelical wave in Northern Kamchatka, my point is that “Faith/Gospel Movements” favored the reintroduction of a plurality of religious specialists, a pattern that had been until the 1930s-40s and the closure of Orthodox chapels and churches by the Soviet authorities. In an article in preparation with Virginie Vaté, I suggest that the presence of various religious specialists (be they shaman, blacksmith, priest, pastor, elder, etc.) plays an important role in the processes of social integration and of cultural transmission. Special attention to various types of ritual altars relates this view with the modes of ritual actions mobilized by each category of specialists in order to represent religiosity. Here, my argument is that the fabrication of ritual altars (for funerary, hunting, pastoral or theatrical purposes) not only reveals the integrating ability of local religious systems but also manifests an act of “social cognition” that informs us about the relevant modes of representation of religiosity.

Regional Center of the Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative (PCRI/Russia )