Sibylle Lustenberger

I am a specialist in the anthropology of kinship and a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. I am currently embarking on a new project on the social organization of hydroelectricity production in the Swiss Alps. In this research, I enquire into the persistence of community owned electricity companies in an increasingly liberalized and international market. I ask: 1) How do struggles over the allocation of ownership, profit and costs reemerge in different moments in time between and within various local institutions? 2) How do diverging values and relations of power shape these encounters? 3) And what configurations of kinship, communality, and capitalism are thereby brought into being? With these questions, the project follows the call of feminist scholars to think kinship and capitalism together (See: Bear, Ho, Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Yanagisako 2015: “Gens: A Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism”).

My interest in the ongoing significance of kinship has also informed my previous research projects on the formation of same-sex parenthood and the current developments surrounding homosexuality in Orthodox Judaism and in Israel. I have been a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel, where I worked with Dr. Tsipy Ivry and a doctoral student at the University of Bern, Switzerland. In my PhD dissertation that I wrote under the supervision of Prof. Dr. em. Edouard Conte, I examined how current definitions of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, in interaction with local understandings of reproduction and the globalized market of assisted reproductive technologies, shape the possibilities of same-sex couples to form families of their own, and how, in turn, their family-building practices reproduce and transform the fragile relationship between Jewish and civil law that stands at the heart of the state.