Simon Teuscher’s research while affiliated with University of Zurich and other places

The preferred tool for conceptualizing, determining, and claiming relations of kinship, ancestry, and descent among humans are diagrams. For this reason, and at the same time to avoid a reduction to biology as transported by terms such as kinship, ancestry, and descent, we introduce the expression diagrammatics of relatedness. We seek to understand the enormous influence that especially tree diagrams have had as a way to express and engage with human relatedness, but hold that this success can only be adequately understood by attending to what in fact are broader diagrammatic practices. These practices bring to light that diagrams of relatedness do not simply make visible natural connections, but create or deny relations in particular ways and for particular reasons. In this special section, contributors investigate diagrams of relatedness in genealogy, heredity, as well as biological and social anthropology. Conceiving of diagrams as techniques that transcend such binaries as ‘thought and action’ and ‘image and text’, we aim at an understanding of how they were constructed and how they functioned in particular epistemic, cultural, and political contexts.

Bei den Mailänderkriegen um 1500 setzen die europäischen Grossmächte auf Söldner aus Graubünden. Diese gelten als besonders kräftig und kriegstüchtig. Auch Bündner Frauen ziehen mit in den Krieg

Ende des Spätmittelalters bestehen im heutigen Graubünden rund 50 Gerichtsgemeinden. Sie sind weitgehend selbstbestimmend. Die Orte vereinigen sich schliesslich zu den «Drei Grauen Bünden»

Im Mittelalter ist auch in hohen Lagen Graubündens Getreide angepflanzt worden. So entstanden Gerichte wie die Gerstensuppe. Mit der Einführung der Alpwirtschaft kamen Einflüsse der italienischen Küche dazu.