The end of the opening roundtable ‘Pasts and Futures in Swiss
Engaged Anthropology’ at the SEG Annual Conference in Neuchatel
on the 10 th November 2022 was an opportunity to surprise and celebrate
one of our most active organising members.
Peter Larsen joined online to award ‘The Engaged Anthropology
Trailblazer Award’ to Dr.Eda Elif Tibet with the following words:
‘In appreciation of your trailblazing engagements, we - your fellow
Interfacers of the Swiss Anthropological Association- present you this
“Engaged Anthropology Trailblazer Award”.
It’s a first in our awarding on innovative, and indeed trailblazing
engagements that are co-creative and collaborative in our collegial work
here in Switzerland and beyond.
You have been “interfacing” - a verb our Commission invented or at least
gave extra meaning to, in broader fields of engagement beyond
academia through your film making skills and endeavors for a thriving
humanity. You bring into being such visions through your growing
collaborative works such as in Bern on a research initiative called,
Animating the Commons, as co-founder and curator of the Ethnokino
filmfest that started in Bern and now spreading to other parts of the
world, your partnership with the Global Diversity Foundation in the UK
in various capacities energized with your anthropological and multi modal
approaches in research and education work, as well as with
collaboratio helvetica, and Alliance for Mediterranean Nature and
Culture, and not the least, the KarmaMotion, your film collective that
generates award winning films.
The Interface Commission would not be where it is today without your
creative skills, constant questions, humour and sense of humanity. We
are proud to have you as a fellow organizing member and are admirers
of your constant drive for change, cooperation, coalitions and
community. This comes both from our senior and junior colleagues..
Your exemplary engagement allowed our Interface Commission to take
form through an inspiring interactive and participatory website and programme concept that gave us visibility, creating an important contemporary interface.’
Doris Bacalzo then presented Eda Elif Tibet with a book and certificate and explained the reason for the accompanying gift:
‘In gratitude for your trailblazing engagements as a fellow Interfacer in
our Swiss Anthropological Association, we thank you with this award and
an accompanying gift, a book about Ruth Landes, a female
anthropologist who, during her time, was forging her prescient
approaches in anthropology under what might be said alongside to much more visibilized anthropologists then, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict in the US, who impacted her path and sometimes slowed it. Yet, Landes persisted until she found her institutional home in Canada
with her trailblazing anthropological approach, such as her contribution to feminist ethnography that, to our present day, resonates and endures.’
Dr.Eda Elif Tibet is a post-doctoral researcher at UniBern where she leads her own independent research initiative "Animating the Commons" at the critical sustainability unit, Institute of Geography. The initiative hosts various applied research, design and film projects.
She works with Collaboratio Helvetica an action research association in Bern for the implementation of the SDG 2030 Agenda through systems change frameworks, and is the lead visual anthropologist at the Global Diversity Foundation (UK & USA & Morocco). She is core faculty at the Global Environments Summer Academy taking place at the University of Oxford each year. She mentors at the Global Environments Network for environmental change-makers across the globe, and works towards films and media impact production with the Alliance for Mediterranean Nature and Culture.
She has co-founded KarmaMotion, a film collective of cultural media and film creators whom produced numerous award winning documentary films and the co-founder of EthnoKino Association, currently curating the Film Festival that is dedicated to visionary filmmakers and visionaries following an open and public ethos of "cinema of the commons". She is also the founder of Fairy Dust Cappadocia, a local community empowerment story-telling project aiming to revitalize the sentient ecology between humans, fairy chimneys, vineyards and their pigeons in a volcanic UNESCO World Heritage Site in Turkey where her ancestors come from.
Eda holds a PhD on Social Anthropology from UniBern (2019) and an Mphil from the University of Kent , UK (2013) and a BA on Economics from Istanbul Bilgi University (2009).
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