Biography

Tobias Schwoerer studied history and social anthropology at the University of Zurich, and received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Lucerne in 2016. He is currently lecturer at the University of Fribourg. He has more than three years of fieldwork experience in Papua New Guinea and was a visiting research fellow at the Australian National University. In research and teaching he specialized on political, economic and environmental anthropology, and has held seminars on colonialism, the anthropology of violence, resource extraction, and adaptations to climate change.

His current research project focuses on strategies of livelihood and decision–making processes in a dynamic and rapidly changing economic environment in the Markham Valley of Papua New Guinea. He investigates how households and kin groups engage with large-scale capitalist projects in the form of mining and industrial tree plantations, and how they continuously change and adapt their already quite diversified economic activities in dynamic interactions with local and global markets.

In his PhD thesis, he previously investigated colonial processes of pacification in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, using a comparative ethno-historical approach to analyze the temporal variations and different outcomes of these processes towards an overarching theory of pacification. He conducted field research in four different villages of the Fore, Auyana and Tairora ethnic groups for sixteen months between 2004 and 2007, and also interviewed former colonial officers to arrive at a polyphonic history of the colonial encounter. At the same time, he collected data on contemporary forms of conflict, sorcery and warfare.