Marco Motta is an anthropologist, senior researcher (SNSF grant holder) at the University of Neuchâtel.

 

Marco Motta is currently conducting research funded by the SNSF on the transition to adulthood and the impact of reception conditions on the health of unaccompanied minors. Prior to this, as part of postdoctoral research, Marco Motta was affiliated with Johns Hopkins Universities in Baltimore, Toronto and Bern. Between 2016 and 2021, he conducted research in Haiti on informal modes of conflict regulation and political violence experienced in ordinary life.

 

His doctoral thesis, defended at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lausanne in 2016, focuses on the companionship between humans and spirits in the disadvantaged urban areas of the capital of Zanzibar. The project aimed to capture the art of living with spirits in its aesthetic, ethical and therapeutic dimensions. The thesis gave rise to the book : fragile minds. Repair ordinary links in Zanzibar (2019, BSN Press).

 

Simultaneously with his field research, Marco Motta is interested in the epistemology and history of the human sciences, in particular the relationships between anthropology, philosophy, art and literature. He is the editor of the book Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality (2021, Fordham University Press). In 2009, he founded the Group Anthropology and Theater with whom he edited and published the book Ambiguous Agreements. What is at stake in the representation (2013, BSN Press).

 

Since 2009, Marco Motta has brought together anthropology with philosophy, art and literature. From his immersive empirical research and various experiences in the world of performance, he has developed skills that can be made available to the project. His experiences had already given rise to a collaboration with Mathieur Bouvier and Loïc Touzé within the framework of the projectFor an atlas of figures, to which he actively contributed. His continual association with artists (actors, musicians, playwrights, dancers, painters, photographers, illustrators and designers) and the philosophical tools (in particular the aesthetics of Wittgenstein and Cavell) that he acquired over the time allowed him to rethink from a new angle the relationship between human action, experience, learning and forms of life.