Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Zainabu Jallo
2025-2026
Discipline(s)
Anthropology and ethnology
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies; Post-colonialism
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Zainabu Jallo is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in anthropology, whose work focuses on material culture and the histories of criminal anthropology in Italy, Brazil, and Cuba. Her research prior to joining the Collegium examined the significant impact of criminal anthropology and the implications of scientific counterfactuals on Afro-Atlantic traditions. This work is part of the Swiss National Science Foundation project Inherited Futures? Objects, Time, and Knowledge.
Zainabu holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Bern (CH). At the University of Basel (CH), she develops and teaches courses in provenance research, museum anthropology, Afro-Atlantic studies, iconic criticism, and material culture.
She is the author of Diasporic Consciousness in the Material Culture of Brazilian Candomblé (2025) and editor of the volume Material Culture in Transit: Theory and Practice (2023), part of the Routledge Studies in Anthropology and Museums series.
Research Project
The Making of the Infrahuman
This project examines how the legacy of criminal anthropology continues to shape modern understandings of what it means to be human—particularly through the material traces it has left behind.
The prejudices embedded in criminal anthropology—and, by extension, forensic anthropology—are rooted in legal and institutional frameworks informed by "scientific research." Over time, these biases contributed to the classification of the infrahuman: individuals considered human, yet not fully entitled to civil liberties; human, but perceived as lagging on the evolutionary scale. The implications of criminal anthropology on contemporary perceptions of what it means to be human remain deeply ingrained in both scientific inquiry and broader society.
This project illustrates the enduring influence of a discredited scientific field—criminal anthropology—in shaping the classification of human types, particularly as reinforced by modern technological tools. Drawing on historiography and methodologies from material culture studies, it analyzes a diverse range of objects whose tangible qualities and afterlives as data offer insight into the historical construction of the infrahuman. The project highlights how such objects are not only sources of information but also active agents in the formation of ideological frameworks.
Research Interests:
criminal anthropology; forensic anthropology; history of science; material culture; historiography; human classification; race and racism; civil liberties; evolutionary theory; biopolitics; scientific bias; institutional history; legal history; technology and power; ideology; posthumanism; critical humanities; decolonial studies; human rights; infrahuman; object studies.