Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings

University of Aberdeen

Department of Anthropology, School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3QY
T: 01224 273124; F: 01224 272552; E: anthropology(AT)abdn.ac.uk
W: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/anthropology

Departmental report

Over the past three years the department has continued to grow, with the appointments of Arnar Arnason in 2004, Johan Rasanayagam in 2005 and James Leach in 2006. Rasanayagam’s position is funded from an ESRC Professorial Fellowship awarded to Tim Ingold (2005-08), and this award has been sufficient to cover one further teaching fellowship for the period, currently held by Tatiana Argounova-Low. A second teaching fellowship has been funded for 18 months from a Norwegian Research Council grant awarded to David Anderson, and was held in 2005-06 by Nathan Porath and in 2006-07 by Griet Scheldeman. A third teaching fellowship was funded by the university for two years (2004-06), pending the appointment of Leach, and this was extended for a further ten months thanks to the award to Leach of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Anthropology. This was held by Andrew Whitehouse.

In 2004 the department successfully applied, through the university, for three five-year post-doctoral fellowships under the new RCUK Academic Fellowships Scheme. All three fellows (Jo Vergunst, Robert Wishart and Alison Brown) were appointed in 2005. Once the five years have elapsed, each of these fellows will progress to lectureships in the department. For up to the first two of the five years, each fellow has been funded from another source: Wishart from a Northern Studies Centre Postdoctoral Fellowship, and Lee and Brown from grants awarded, respectively, by the ESRC and AHRC.

The number of postgraduate students supervised by staff in the department has risen exponentially, from 5.5 FTE in 2001 to 14.2 in 2004 and 24.98 in 2007. Including students in the writing-up period, the current head-count is around 32. The first anthropology PhD was awarded in 2003, followed by one in both 2004 and 2005. No fewer that five PhDs were awarded in 2006, and the cumulative total to date is 12.5. An ESRC award under the Researcher Development Initiative, for 2006-08, has made possible the development of a Scotland-wide postgraduate training consortium in anthropological research (the STAR Programme), involving the universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews.

The department’s research is focused on the two priority themes of Anthropology of the North and Culture, Creativity and Perception, and includes a number of externally-funded research projects. The Baikal Archaeological Project (BAP), funded by the SSHRC of Canada, has entered its second phase, and several staff, postdoctoral fellows and research students are involved in the project’s ethnoarchaeological module. Ongoing archival and ethnohistorical research in Siberia has been funded by grants from the ESRC (2003-05), AHRC (2003-08) and the Norwegian Research Council (2005-08), as well as by a grant from the British Library under its Endangered Archives Programme. The Department is also involved in the development of the new European Science Foundation BOREAS Programme (Histories from the North: environments, movements, narratives). The AHRC has funded a two-year project (2005-07) entitled Material histories: social relationships between Scots and Aboriginal Peoples in the Canadian fur-trade, c. 1870-1930, and is currently funding another two-year project (2007-09) entitled An anthropological approach to bird sound,while a project on Dance, tradition and power among Alaskan Eskimos (2006-08) is being funded by the ESRC. The AHRC-funded project Learning is understanding in practice: exploring the interrelations between perception, creativity and skill, carried out in collaboration with the School of Fine Art at the University of Dundee, concluded in 2005 with an exhibition entitled Fieldnotes and sketchbooks at Aberdeen Art Gallery.

A workshop on Ways of walking took place in 2005, as part of an ESRC-funded project (2004-06) on Culture from the ground: walking, movement and placemaking, and a volume of papers from the workshop will be published in 2008, by Ashgate, as the first in a new series of Anthropological Studies of Creativity and Perception, edited by Tim Ingold. A grant from the AHRC, under its Landscape and Environment Programme, has funded a further series of seminars, in collaboration between the department and the EHESS, Paris, on Landscapes beyond land: new ethnographies of landscape and environment, held during 2007. The department is hosting an additional series of five workshops on Art, architecture and anthropology (2005-08), funded by the ESRC as part of Ingold’s three-year programme of research on Comparative explorations in the anthropology of the line.

Full-time teaching staff

David Anderson (PhD 1996, Cambridge; Senior Lecturer) Circumpolar ethnology, ecology, political theory, history of anthropology, aboriginal rights, national identity, the ‘transition’ in East Europe; Siberia, northern Canada, eastern Europe

Tatiana Argounova-Low (PhD 2001, Cambridge; Teaching and Research Fellow) Ethnic identity, nationalism, post-socialist societies, oral traditions, food and diet, reindeer herding communities; Siberia, Sakha (Yakutia), Enenkia

Arnar Arnason (PhD 1999, Durham; Lecturer) Death, emotion and psychotherapy, subjectivities and subjection, narratives, memory and forgetting, embodiment, identity and landscape; England, Japan, Iceland, Scotland

Neil Curtis (M.Litt. 1996, Aberdeen; Senior Curator, Marischal Museum, and Honorary Lecturer in Anthropology) Identity, material and time in archaeological and museum contexts, young children’s learning in museums, the uses of archaeology in education, the treatment of human remains

Elizabeth Hallam (PhD 1994, Kent; Senior Lecturer) Anthropology and history; textual and visual representations; historical anthropology of the body; death and dying; material and visual cultures; histories of collecting and museums; anthropology of anatomy. Fieldwork, archival and museum research in England and Scotland

Tim Ingold (PhD 1976, Cambridge; Professor) Ecological anthropology, hunting-gathering and pastoralism, evolutionary theory, technology and language, perception and cognition, skill, relations between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, comparative anthropology of the line; Northern circumpolar societies, Saami, northern Finnish farmers

Alex King (PhD 2000, Virginia; Lecturer) Anthropological linguistics, cultural revival and nationalism, native language education in post-socialist societies, everyday talk and representations of indigenous culture; Kamchatka, Siberia

James Leach (PhD 1997, Manchester; Senior Lecturer) Kinship, creativity, place/landscape, art, ownership of intellectual and cultural property, knowledge production, science-art collaborations; free software. Madang, Papua New Guinea, also interdisciplinary collaborations in the UK

Johan Rasanayagam (PhD 2002, Cambridge; Lecturer) Postsocialist societies, anthropology of Islam, morality and subjectivity, healing practices and spirit possession, anthropology of the state; Uzbekistan and Central Asia

Nancy Wachowich (PhD 2001, British Columbia; Lecturer) Oral traditions, ethnohistory, museum studies, environmental thought, ethnographic film; Inuit, Canadian Arctic and Subarctic, Circumpolar North

Postdoctoral research fellows

Alison Brown (PhD 2001, Oxford; RCUK Academic Fellow) Museum anthropology, Aboriginal heritage management practices in Canada, repatriation, material culture, ethnographic photography, ethnohistory, Scots-Aboriginal relations in the fur trade; Scotland, Canada, Kainai Nation

Nicolas Ellison (PhD 2004, Paris; Fyssen Foundation Fellow 2005-06) Anthropology of environment and economy, perception and representation, space and landscape, agricultural systems and development, ritual dance and performance; Mexico, Totonac and Nahua communities

Petra-Tjitske Kalshoven (PhD 2006, McGill University, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow) Museum anthropology, anthropology of leisure and tourism, poetics and politics of representation and identity, identity play and cultural appropriation, ecological anthropology, cognitive anthropology, social productions of knowledge; Indianist mimetic practices

Jo Vergunst (formerly Lee) (PhD 2004, Aberdeen; RCUK Academic Fellow) Walking, place and landscape phenomenology, perception of urban and rural environments, European rural social change, farming and environmentalism, renewable energy; Orkney, Scotland, Europe

Griet Scheldeman (PhD 2006, St Andrews; Teaching Fellow) Health and quality of life, insulin pump usage among adolescent diabetics, art and aesthetics of landscape; Dundee, Scotland, Norway

Andrew Whitehouse (PhD 2004, St Andrews; Teaching Fellow) Nature conservation, farming, identity, knowledge and values, ecological anthropology, continuity and change, birds and birdsong; Islay (Inner Hebrides), Scottish Highlands, Britain

Rob Wishart (PhD 2003, Alberta; RCUK Academic Fellow) Oral history, identity, colonial wildlife management regimes, continuities in hunting traditions, ethnohistory, landscape; Sub-arctic Canada, Gwich’in, Ojibwe, Scottish fur-traders

Anthropologists elsewhere in the university

Gabriele Marranci (PhD 2003, Belfast; Lecturer in the Anthropology of Religion, School of Divinity, History and Religious Studies) Anthropology of Islam, emotions and identity, anthropology of music; Europe, North Africa, Middle East, South Asia

Martin Mills (PhD 1997, Edinburgh; Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of Religion, School of Divinity, History and Religious Studies) Anthropology of religion, including post-diaspora Tibetan political and religious practice, relations between law and state in theocratic societies; Tibet, Himalaya, Nepal, Bhutan, India

Trevor Stack (PhD 2000, Pennsylvania; Lecturer in Hispanic Studies, School of Language and Literature) History and anthropology, urban citizenship, tracing culture in time and space; western Mexico

Will Tuladhar-Douglas (PhD Oxford; Lecturer in Religious Studies, School of Divinity, History and Religious Studies) Historical anthropology of Buddhism, relation between religion and technology, urban religions and their foundation in myths, ethnobotany, methodology in the historical anthropology of religions; Kathmandu, Nepal, Himalaya