Fabio Gygi

Fabio Gygi serves as Senior Lecturer and Chair in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, University of London. Born in Switzerland, he spent formative years in Japan, Germany, and England before earning his PhD in social anthropology from UCL. Prior to joining SOAS, he worked for three years as an assistant professor of sociology at Doshisha University in Kyoto.

• MA in European Ethnology and Japanese Studies from University of Tübingen
• PhD in Social Anthropology from University College London (UCL)

Dr. Gygi's research centers on material culture, particularly examining human-object relationships through three interconnected lenses: how people engage with possessions and the cosmologies they create, the cultural construction of hoarding as pathology (following its 2013 DSM-V classification), and the materialization of gender in Japanese contexts. His work bridges historical anthropology with contemporary ethnographic studies, often employing participant observation methods such as assisting with apartment clean-ups in Tokyo to study hoarding behaviors.

His recent publications reveal consistent thematic trajectories across Japanese cultural studies, with particular emphasis on material agency, waste practices, and the social life of objects. The 2022-2023 publications demonstrate expanding interest in robotics and human-technology interaction alongside continuing work on gender performance and material culture in Japan.

As a dedicated supervisor, Dr. Gygi currently guides fifteen PhD students across diverse topics including Japanese sex work activism, transgender existence in Kansai, assistive technology in Japan, and queer feminist kinship in Taipei. His supervision portfolio reflects his interdisciplinary approach connecting material culture studies with gender, technology, and mental health anthropology.

His fieldwork primarily conducted in Tokyo informs his theoretical contributions to understanding materiality, while his earlier work on trench art from World War I established foundations for examining how traumatic experiences become embodied in material culture across historical and contemporary contexts.