Raluca Mateoc completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Fribourg and is a postdoctoral researcher within the Japanese Studies Unit at the University of Geneva. Her research interests lie in Japanese cultural heritage, rurality, memory, environmental humanities, and comparative governance.

Her monograph examines the representations of socialist agricultural and non-agricultural practices in Romanian countryside in biographic interviews, archival documents, and local museums. Recollections of ethnographic fieldwork in East-Central Europe from the 1970s onwards informed her latest edited volume. Her postdoctoral research explores the Christian material culture in the Nagasaki region (Japan) as presented in and affected by tourism narratives in the wake of its World Heritage inscription. She conducted research stays at the University of Tokyo, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and held guest lectures at the University of Geneva. Her research grants were awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the German Academic Exchange Service.

Her lectureship “Patrimoine religieux, tourisme et globalisation au Japon” offers an anthropological introduction to Japanese society through the lens of concepts such as neoliberalism, cultural (counter)hegemony, globalization, and moral economy. Cultural heritage is used as an avenue for looking at the changing Japanese countryside regarding religiosity and ritual, lifestyle migration, utopian visions of living, agroecology, art tourism or culinary nationalism.