From January 2024, Bettina Beer will be the new president of the Swiss Anthropological Association (SAA). The Association's next conference will be held in Lucerne in June 2024 (https://www.sagw.ch/seg/tagungen-der-seg/jahrestagung-2024). Bettina Beer is a social anthropologist interested in intergroup relations and social categories, as well as their empirical and theoretical articulation. She is currently researching conflicts and ruptures in kin relations through their effects on social networks, with particular focus on questions of “choice" as they relate to kin. With a distinguished track record in ethnographic research, Beer's work has taken her to the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, where she has conducted in-depth studies. In addition to her extensive work in social anthropology, Bettina Beer has contributed to the history of anthropology, a field in which she remains involved. Her engagement in this field underlines her commitment to an understanding of anthropology in terms of its historical foundations, its theoretical development and contemporary applications. All these strategically inform her vision and objectives as the president of the Swiss Anthropological Association (SAA). She is co-editor of the influential social science journal Sociologus, chair of the European Society for Oceanists and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Lucerne. Her latest book publications include the Wampar-English Dictionary (2021, with Hans Fischer) and Capital and Inequality in Rural Papua New Guinea (2022, with Tobias Schwoerer).
