Martin grew up in a village in eastern Switzerland. He worked in carpentry, as a gardener and in a stained glass atelier. He was also an actor in theatre and directed two plays. He studied social and cultural anthropology in Zurich and taught visual anthropology at Zurich University’s ethnographic museum. He did his PhD at Oxford University on a Clarendon scholarship and obtained his doctorate in 2010 with a thesis on the industrialization of Tibetan medicine in Tibet.

In 2011, he joined the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore with a project entitled “Neighbouring China: Ancient Crossroads, New Connections”, working mainly in the borderlands of Nepal and Tibet. As a Marie Curie Fellow at LMU Munich, he extended the project into Central Asia.

Between 2015 and 2020, Martin was leading the research project “Remoteness & Connectivity: Highland Asia in the World”, funded by an ERC Starting Grant. Since 2022 he is the principle investigator of the current ERC Consolidator Grant project “Foraging at the Edge of Capitalism”.

A wanderer between arts and academia, Martin directed and produced three feature length documentary films. The latest, “Murghab”, internationally premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival. He ran the photography blog [the other image]. He curated the exhibition “Highland Flotsam” and did several photographic exhibitions of his own work.

Monographs

• 2022: Places in Knots. Remoteness and Connectivity in the Himalayas and Beyond. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Open access.
• 2013: Manufacturing Tibetan Medicine. The Creation of An Industry and the Moral Economy of Tibetanness. Oxford/New York: Berghahn.

Edited volumes and Special issues

• 2020 (with Philipp Schorch and Marlen Elders): Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond. London UCL Press. Open access.
• 2019 (with Ruben Andersson): The Return of Remoteness: Insecurity, Isolation and Connectivity in the New World Disorder. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 27 (2)
• 2018 (with Alexander Horstmann and Alessandro Rippa): Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands. Milton Park and New York: Routledge.
• 2017 (with Zhang Juan): The Art of Neighbouring: Mediating Borders along China’s Frontiers, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.