Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings
University of Edinburgh
Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Studies, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15A George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD
T: 0131 650 3933; F: 0131 650 3945
W: http://www.san.ed.ac.uk
Departmental report
Dr Richard Baxstrom and Dr Joost Fontein joined the programme as Lecturers in August 2007; after completing the final year of his British Academy postdoctoral fellowship here in Edinburgh Dr Magnus Course will start as Lecturer in August 2008. Our current postdoctoral fellows also include Dr Giovanni Bochi (Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World), Dr Jennifer Curtis, Dr Aya Ikegame, Dr Laura Jeffery and Dr Alex Smith (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities).
Dr Toby Kelly has been promoted to Senior Lecturer. Professor Alan Barnard has been appointed Honorary Consul of the Republic of Namibia.
We are very sad to announce the death in December 2007 of our highly respected and much-loved colleague Dr Charles Jedrej. An annual lecture in Dr Jedrej’s memory will be given by Social Anthropology together with the Centre for African Studies. The first lecture (in Spring 2009) will be given by Dr Joost Fontein.
Teaching
We teach about 300 students in our introductory courses and about 45 students in years 3 and 4 of our Honours programme, which includes a dissertation based on field-research carried out in the summer of the 3rd year. An impressive number of students taking our Taught MSc programmes (in Social Anthropology and the Anthropology of Health and Illness) go on to our MSc Res/PhD programmes, which currently include about 45 students. As a member of the Scottish Programme of Training in Social Anthropology (STAR), each spring we offer our first-year and writing-up research students the opportunity to attend week-long residential courses involving master classes and plenary lectures from distinguished visitors.
Research
Heonik Kwon has been appointed a Member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the Government of the Republic of Korea. Heonik's pathbreaking research on historical memory and on the long-term impact of atrocities perpetrated during civil wars led to his election as External Advisor for the Committee for the Investigation of the Korean War Civilian Massacres.
* Tobias Kelly has been awarded an ESRC Research Fellowship (2008-2011): Tortured Ethics: Anthropology of International Law and Ethics.
* Anthony Good, with Robert Gibb of the University of Glasgow, has been awarded a grant under the AHRC Migration and Diasporas programme on The Conversion of Asylum Applicants’ Narratives into Legal Discourses in the UK and France: A Comparative Study of Problems of Cultural Translation.
* Stefan Ecks and Ian Harper, with Roger Jeffery in Sociology and Allyson Pollock in the School of Health in Social Science, have been awarded a grant under the joint ESRC-DfID scheme for a project entitled Tracing Pharmaceuticals in South Asia: Regulation, Distribution and Consumption.
* Jonathan Spencer, with Jonathan Goodhand (SOAS), Benedikt Korf (Zurich), Shahul Hasbullah and Tudor Silva (both Peradeinya), has been awarded a grant under the ESRC Non-Governmental Action Programme on Conflict, Community and Faith: the Politics of Non Governmental Public Action in Sri Lanka.
* Janet Carsten has been awarded a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for Blood Work: Investigating Cultures of Biomedicine in Malaysia and Britain.
* Laura Jeffery has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship - "Chagossian strategies of migration and integration in Crawley, West Sussex".
Drs Jeanne Cannizzo, Joost Fontein and John Harries have organised a research group, the Bones Collective; Spring 2008 saw a seminar series devoted to “What Lies Beneath: Exploring the affective presence & emotive materiality of human bones”.
Full-time teaching staff
Professor Alan Barnard (Personal Chair: Anthropology of Southern Africa) Hunter-gatherers, regional structural analysis, history of anthropology; Southern Africa
Dr Richard Baxstrom (Lecturer) Southeast Asia (particularly Malaysia); religion, ritual and belief; anthropology of law; cinema, film theory and popular culture.
Professor Francesca Bray (Chair of Social Anthropology) Science, technology and medicine; politics of everyday technologies; food systems; reproductive cultures; gender; China, East Asia, California, Europe
Dr Jeanne Cannizzo (Senior Lecturer) Art, aesthetics, material culture, museums and exhibitions; Canada, Sierra Leone, Scotland
Professor Janet Carsten (Personal Chair: Social and Cultural Anthropology, Head of Subject) Kinship; gender and the person; genomics and reproductive technologies; the house; migration; memory; adoption; Malaysia, Southeast Asia, Britain
Dr Magnus Course (BA Postdoctoral Fellow/Lecturer) The relations between kinship, personhood, power and language in the context of Native South American socialities.
Dr Stefan Ecks (Lecturer) Medical anthropology, theory and history of anthropology, popular Hinduism, science studies; India (Bengal)
Dr Joost Fontein (Lecturer) Research interests include the anthropology of the past, history, landscape, place and heritage; Zimbabwe and Southern Africa.
Professor Anthony Good (Personal Chair: Social Anthropology in Practice) Asylum and immigration law; family and kinship; domestic and religious ceremonies; social development policy; NGOs; Tamil Nadu, South India, Sri Lanka, UK
Dr Ian Harper (Lecturer) Anthropology of medicine and public health; infectious diseases especially TB; development; healers and their relationships; Nepal and the Himalaya
Dr Iris Jean-Klein (Senior Lecturer) Social organisation under conditions of political instability, political organisation, activism, gender, selfhood, political conflict, peace, human rights; Middle East
Dr Tobias Kelly (Senior Lecturer) Legal and political anthropology, citizenship, political violence, legal reform; Israel/Palestine, Middle East
Dr Heonik Kwon (Lecturer; ESRC-funded research leave 2005/06) Symbolic ecology, cultural studies of the Cold War, popular religions, philosophy of money, memory, kinship and political history; East Siberia, Central Vietnam
Dr Rebecca Marsland (Lecturer in Medical Anthropology) Malaria, Aids; public health discourses; collaborations between ‘traditional’ and biomedical healers; Nyakusa; Tanzania, East Africa; UK
Professor Jonathan Spencer (Personal Chair: Anthropology of South Asia) The political in the everyday; nationalism; democracy and the state; violence; history; Buddhism; history of anthropology; Sri Lanka, South and Southeast Asia
Dr Neil Thin (Senior Lecturer) Happiness, social progress, poverty, social development policy and planning, human rights, civil society, forestry; South India, Rwanda, Indonesia
Dr Dimitri Tsintjilonis (Lecturer) Death; ritual and religion; indigenous cosmologies; embodiment and the anthropology of the body; personhood; gender; sacred violence; Indonesia and Southeast Asia
Postdoctoral research fellows
Dr Giovanni Bochi (ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, CASAW) Political and social activism in Lebanon.
Dr Jennifer Curtis (ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow) A comparison of conflict transformation processes in Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland. Dr Curtis is also working on a monograph entitled A Peopled State: Democracy, Development, and Making Peace in Northern Ireland.
Dr John Harries (Honorary Fellow) Postcolonial settler societies; the anthropology of the historical imagination; indigeneity and identity in settler societies; historiography of travel and tourism; visual anthropology and representation of landscapes; society and culture of Newfoundland, Canada.
Dr Aya Ikegame (ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow) Kingship in South India; the roles of religious leaders in contemporary Karnataka politics.
Dr Laura Jeffery (Leverhulme Early Career Fellow) Her doctoral research among displaced Chagos islanders in Mauritius (Indian Ocean) focused on narratives of exclusion and belonging, changing representations of the homeland, the politics of victimhood, collective identification, and community mobilisation. Her postdoctoral research among migrant Chagossians in Crawley (West Sussex) focuses on strategies of migration and integration and reformulations of 'home'.
Dr Anne Jepson (Honorary Fellow) Gardens and gardening practice; politics of landscape and the environment; debates around nature; politics and change in higher education; academic career paths; Cyprus, Skye and islands generally
Alex TT Smith (IASH Postdoctoral Fellow) After holding an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Edinburgh, Alex took up the Sociological Review Fellowship at Keele University where he has been developing a book manuscript entitled Banal activism: devolution, electioneering and marginality in rural Scotland (forthcoming Manchester University Press/University of Michigan Press). He was also awarded a small grant from the British Academy to develop a new research project on US politics. He now returns to Edinburgh as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (IASH), where he will complete his book.
Honorary and visiting staff
Professor Anthony Cohen (Honorary Professor; Principal, Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh) Symbolic construction of community; identity; anthropology of consciousness; Britain, Shetlands
Professor Thomas Blom Hansen (Visiting Professor) Nationalism, ethnicity, political culture; India, South Africa
Professor A.F. Robertson (Honorary Professor) Political, economic and historical implications of family life; greed; growth; closing the gap between biological and cultural approaches in anthropology; Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, USA
Dr Roy Willis (Honorary Fellow) Symbolism, mythology, ritual, healing; Africa (Tanzania, Zambia)
Anthropologists in other departments
Ann Griffiths: Legal processes; Botswana
Patricia Jeffery: Gender, development, medical anthropology; India