Marco Lazzarotti is an Akademischer Mitarbeiter and Lecturer at the Institute of Ethnology of the University of Heidelberg. He is also the Vice-director of the Department of Ethnology of the IRIAE International Research Institute for Archaeology and Ethnology.

Visiting Fellow at the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at the Boston College, Boston, MA, Summer 2022.

Junior Fellow at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities "Fate, Freedom and Prognostication. Strategies for Coping with the Future in East Asia and Europe." Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. 

In 2018, he obtained a PhD in Anthropology at the Ruperto Carola University of Heidelberg.

Lazzarotti started his education at the University of Pisa, where he obtained his B.A. and first M.A. in Conservation of Cultural, Environmental and Architectonic Heritages, with a specialization in Archaeology.

After graduation, in order to expand his horizons, Lazzarotti decided to go to Taiwan, where he dedicated himself to the study of the Chinese language and later obtained a Master Degree in Cultural Anthropology at the National Taiwan University. During 10 years of living in Taiwan, he did extensive fieldwork. All this work on the field helped him to reach an advanced knowledge of the Chinese language and culture. His research touches aspects linked to the effect of Catholicism on the tradition of ancestor rites in Taiwan, to Inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue and to the Modernization of Funeral Rites in Taiwan.

After that, he decided to move his family to Sierra Leone to contribute to a noble cause as well as to expand his horizons and anthropological perspectives. In Sierra Leone, he took on several academic activities, from teaching courses to being a Chief Librarian at the University of Makeni. He also taught Chinese classes for beginners in the Language Center of the University.

He is currently lecturing courses at the Department of Ethnology of the University of Heidelberg.

His first book is Place, Alterity, and Narration in a Taiwanese Catholic Village.

He recently published his second book God, Jesus and the Ancestors
An Ethnography of the Ancestors’ Rites in the Taiwanese Catholic Church
.

He is a member of the Network in Italiano sulla Morte e l’Oblio (NIMO).

Marco was also awarded The Phi Tau Phi Scholastic Honour Society of the Republic of China for achieving academic excellence.

He is currently living in Heppenheim (Germany) with his wife and their son. He can be contacted at [email protected] or through this webpage.

 

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Some videos about my research topics are available on my Youtube Channel