George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. His research and teaching explore broadly the political economy of sexuality, ethnicity, belonging, citizenship, and knowledge production. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in East Africa and Eastern Europe, his writing takes desire, intimacy, and embodiment as central sites for understanding historical shifts in the global world order.
He is the author of two award-winning monographs. Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2017) traces how the tourist commodification of ethnic sexuality reshapes belonging and relations of age, gender, generation, and kinship among Samburu in northern Kenya. This book received the Ruth Benedict Prize and the Nelson Graburn Prize of the American Anthropological Association and was finalists for the Elliott P. Skinner Award (Association of Africanist Anthropology). His second book, Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2023), analyzes the production of homophobic violence through objects whose circulation in rumor, political rhetoric, and daily life indirectly constructs the homosexual body as a target of repudiation. This book received the Amaury Talbot Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute and was finalist for the Bethwell A. Ogot Award (African Studies Association).
Meiu has published widely in leading journals—including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnos, HAU, and Anthropology Today—as well as in edited volumes on tourism, bodies, sexuality, futures, and the history of anthropology. He is co-editor of Ethnicity, Commodity, In/Corporation (Indiana University Press, 2020), which examines the global entanglements of ethnicity in markets, nationalisms, and consumption. He is also author of the Romanian-language monograph Vin feciorii cu turca! (Arania, 2004), a historical ethnography of a ceremony that has been central to nationalist, communist, and post-socialist imaginaries of rural identity in Romania.
His current work includes two book projects. The first, The Fetish of Order: Anthropology, Coloniality, Mess, traces competing investments in “order” by anthropologists, colonial and post independence governments, and indigenous communities in Kenya over the past century. The second, The Unconscious of Inheritance: Memory and Materiality in the Anthropologist’s House, draws on his own life, family’s history and research in Romania to theorize how artifacts transmit across generations something we “do not know we know”: a set of subjective orientations and templates of value.
Meiu holds a BA in anthropology from Concordia University in Montreal and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago, where he received the Daniel F. Nugent Prize for best dissertation in historical anthropology. Before joining Basel in 2022, he taught at Harvard University, where he was promoted to full professor with tenure in Anthropology and African and African American Studies.
He is also co-producer and host of Ethnographic Imagination Basel, a video podcast that brings anthropological ideas and debates to broader publics.