Alessandro Rippa is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology. His research concerns infrastructure, global circulations, and the environment. He is the PI of the ERC Starting Grant project "Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene" (2023-2028).
Since 2025 Alessandro is Head of Research and Head of the PhD programme at SAI.
ACADEMIC INTERESTS
Thematic: infrastructure, border studies, global circulations, environmental anthropology, geology, STS, amber
Regional: Western China, Myanmar, Italian Alps, Pakistan
ABOUT
Alessandro is interested in theoretical and empirical convergences of infrastructure development, human-environment relations, and social change in contemporary China, Southeast Asia, Pakistan, and Europe. His doctoral and post-doctoral research explored some of the unintended consequences of fast-paced infrastructure development, the boundaries of formal and informal in transnational exchanges, and the commodification and marginalisation of ethnic minorities at China's borderlands with Pakistan, Myanmar, and Laos. He has also addressed the social and environmental components of Chinese infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia, particularly in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative and ongoing investments in extractive and agricultural industries across the region. Lastly, Alessandro has been working on conservation, hunting, and local responses to environmental change in the Italian Alps, his native region.
Alessandro's current project is funded by an ERC Starting Grant, and sets out to be the first global study of amber from an anthropological perspective. Amber is a fossil resin secreted by plants between 300 and 16 million years ago, mostly during phases of climate breakdown and ecological crises. Amber is today found and studied across the world for the prehistoric lifeforms it contains. Their study, geologists and palaeontologists believe, can help us answering key questions about the planet’s climatic history, and understanding how and why species adapted, or failed to adapt, during previous phases of mass extinction. Amber is also a well-known and sought-after gemstone, fuelling violent mining economies from Myanmar to Russia, Ukraine and Mexico, and constitutes a global market increasingly driven by Chinese demand. Amber thus offers a unique entry point to interrogate the current moment characterised by growing extractivism, trade, environmental crises, and conflict. Through amber, this project further aims to pay closer ethnographic attention to the geological, to what continues to be understood as inert, passive, lifeless -- and thus to address some of the key empirical and theoretical challenges posed by the Anthropocene. This project draws on Alessandro's long-term work among amber miners and traders at the China-Myanmar borderlands, as well as on more recent research in Sicily, Chiapas, Poland, and eastern Germany.
Alessandro is also part of the research consortium RURALEX, funded by the HERA-CHANSE scheme “Crisis – Perspectives from the Humanities.” RURALEX examines the nexus of depopulation, environmental change, and the rise of populism across rural Europe, and brings together six universities in Finland, Estonia, Romania, the UK, and Spain, beside Norway, as well as ten Associate Partners across eight different case studies. As part of this project Alessandro will continue his work in rural and depopulating valleys in the Italian Alps, seeking to better understand how abandonment and rewilding become contested sites of political confrontation, and why.
BACKGROUND
Before joining SAI, Alessandro completed his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen (2015). He subsequently held postdoctoral positions at LMU Munich (part of the ERC project Highland Asia) and at the University of Colorado Boulder (part of the China Made project). Between 2019 and 2022 he was Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Tallinn University, and between 2020-2025 he has been affiliated with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society where he led the project Environing Infrastructure.
Alessandro’s research has been funded by the European Research Council, HERA-CHANCE, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Estonian Research Council, and the ERA.Net RUS Plus programme. Since 2018, he is on the editorial collective of the journal ROADSIDES.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Books
2020. Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development and Control in Western China. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
2015. Cuore dell’Eurasia: Il Xinjiang dalla Preistoria al 1949 [Heart of Eurasia: Xinjiang from Prehistory to 1949]. Milano: Mimesis Edizioni. ISBN: 978-88-5752-789-5.
Edited Volumes and Special Issues
2023. “Chinese Infrastructure: Techno-Politics, Materialities, Legacies” The China Quarterly, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741023001005 (with Tim Oakes)
2021. “Archive.” Roadsides, Collection no. 005.
2020. “China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the Ground.” Political Geography (edited with Gustavo Olivera, Galen Murton, Tyler Harlan and Yang Yang)
2019. “Under Construction: Visions of Chinese Infrastructure.” Made in China Journal 4(2) (edited with Tim Oakes)
2018. Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands. London and New York: Routledge (edited with Alexander Horstmann and Martin Saxer)
Peer-reviewed Journal Articles
2024. “Trading in Troubled Times: The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, military coup, and Chinese border closure on the Kachin amber industry.” Area, DOI: 10.111/area.12970 (with Dan Seng Lawn)
Rippa, A. 2024. “Cultural mobilities and cultural heritage: concepts for an Asia-centric approach.” Journal of the British Academy 12(1&2): https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a12 (with Karen O’Brien-Kop and Xiang Ren)
2024. “Where tourism fails: the (un)making of a post-working landscape in the Italian Alps.” Landscape Research, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2024.2309310.
2023. “Infrastructure and the Environment in Anthropology.” Social Science Information, DOI: 10.1177/05390184231189126.
2023. “Infrastructural thinking in China: A research agenda” The China Quarterly, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741023001005 (with Tim Oakes)
2023. “’We don’t eat those bananas’: Chinese plantation expansion and bordering on Northern Myanmar’s Kachin borderlands.” Eurasian Geography and Economics, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2023.2215802 (with Jasnea Sarma and Karin Dean)
2022. “Infrastructures and B/Ordering: How Chinese projects are ordering China-Myanmar border spaces.” Territory, Politics, Governance, DOI: 10.1080/21622671.2022.2108892. (with Karin Dean and Jasnea Sarma)
2022. “From guest traders to live streamers: Hospitality and technology in Yunnan’s gemstone market.” Social Analysis 66(1): 44-63.
2022. “Imagined Borderlands: Terrain, Technology and Trade in the making and managing of the China-Myanmar border.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12429.
2021. “Hunting, Rewilding, and Multispecies Entanglements in the Alps.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2021.1939398.
2021. “Archive: An Introduction.” Roadsides 5: 1-5. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.26034/roadsides-202100501
2020. “China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the ground.” Political Geography (with Gustavo Olivera, Galen Murton, Tyler Harlan and Yang Yang)
2020. “Mapping the Margins of China’s Global Ambition: Economic Corridors, Silk Roads, and the End of Proximity in the Borderlands.” Eurasian Geography and Economics 61(1): 55-76.
2020. “Building Highland Asian in the 21st Century.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 6(2) (with Galen Murton and Matthäus Rest)
2019. “Road Animism: Reflections on the life of infrastructures.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 9(2): 373-389 (with Matthaüs Rest)
2019. “Zomia 2.0: Branding Remoteness and Neoliberal Connectivity in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, Laos.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale 27(2): 253-269.
2019. “Development for all? State schemes, security and marginalisation in 21st-century Kashgar.” Critical Asian Studies, 51(2): 274-295 (with Rune Steenberg)
2018. “Cross-Border Trade and “the Market” between Xinjiang (China) and Pakistan.” Journal of Contemporary Asia,49(2): 254-271.
2017. “The Amber Road: Cross-border trade and the regulation of the Burmite market in Tengchong, Yunnan.” TRaNS: Trans –Regional and –National Studies of Southeast Asia 5(2): 243-267 (with Yi Yang)
2017. “Centralising Peripheries: The Belt and Road Initiative and its role in the Development of the Chinese Borderlands.” International Journal of Business Anthropology 7(1): 1-21.
2016. “Oltre il Khunjerab: Violenza, Confini e rappresentazioni dello Stato tra Xinjiang (Cina) e Pakistan [Across the Khunjerab: Violence, Borders, and Representations of the State between Xinjiang (China) and Pakistan.” Quaderni Asiatici113: 83-108.
2014. “Re-Writing Mythology in Xinjiang: The Case of the Queen Mother of the West, King Mu, and the Kunlun.” The China Journal 71: 43-64.
Book Chapters and Encyclopaedia Entries
2025. “Migrant lives in border contexts: the case of the Burmese communities in Yunnan’s Ruili and Tengchong.” In: H. Ø. Haugen, B. Wang (eds.) Handbook of Migration to China. Elgar Publishing: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035332700.00034 (with Yi Yang)
2025. “China as ethnographic absent present: Missed encounters in the Polish and Mexican amber markets.” In: D. Wu, A.E. Pia, E. Pulford (eds) China as Context: Anthropology, post-globalisation and the neglect for China. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
2024. “From Behind Black Bars: Productive redactions and mass incarceration in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 2017-2022.” In: L. Min, F. Bille, C. Makley (eds.) [Redacted]: Writing in the Negative Space of the State. Goleta, CA: Punctum Books, 221-234 (with Rune Steenberg)
Rippa, A. 2024. “The Travelling Carpet: Mobility, Trade and Identity along the Karakoram Highway.” In: T. Burger, U. Mahar, P. Schild, A-M. Walter (eds) The Multi-sided Ethnographer: Living the Field beyond Research. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 93-112.
2023. “Infrastructure Development in Xinjiang.” In: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. New York: Oxford University Press: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.729.
2021. “Environing the Tourism Frontier: Infrastructure, Nature and the State in China’s Dulong Valley.” In: M. Mostafanezhad, C. Azcarate, and R. Norum (eds.), Tourism Geopolitics: Assemblages of Power, Mobility and the State. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press (with Roger Norum)
2021. “From Boom to Bust – to Boom Again? Infrastructural promises and the politics of suspension at the China-Laos borderlands.” In: M. Chettri and M. Eilenberg (edited by), Development Zones in Asian Borderlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 231-251.
2018. “Old Routes, New Roads: Proximity across the China-Pakistan Border.” In: Horstmann, A., Saxer, M.,Rippa, A. (eds) Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands. London and New York: Routledge, 114-126.
2018. “Asian Borderlands in a Global Perspective.” In: Horstmann, A., Saxer, M., Rippa, A. (eds) Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands. London and New York: Routledge, 1-13 (with Martin Saxer and Alexander Horstmann)