Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings
Cambridge University
Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF
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Departmental report
Staff developments and the anthropological community
There have been several changes in both academic and assistant staff, which will enable the Department to conduct its core activities of research and teaching with greater efficiency. The teaching complement of the staff comprised 15 people: 13 UTOs plus Dr Barbara Bodenhorn (Isaac Newton Lecturer) and Dr Hildegard Diemberger (Senior Research Associate). Dr Uradyn Bulag was appointed as a Reader in Social Anthropology. Dr Perveez Mody was appointed as temporary Lecturer. Dr Monica Bonaccorso-Rothe was appointed as Affiliated Lecturer. Also new to the Department was Dr Daniele Moretti, who joined as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. Other new Departmental Associates are Dr Chris Kaplonski, Senior Research Associate at MIASU and Project Manager for 'The Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia', Dr Gregory Delaplace, Research Associate at MIASU, and Dr Ruth Prince, ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow and Smuts Postdoctoral Fellow at the African Studies Centre. Dr Monica Konrad, Senior Research Associate, heads up the 'International Science and Bioethics Collaborations' project. She is joined by Miss Adele Langlois, Research Associate, and Miss Birgit Buergi, Research Assistant.
Three of our postgraduate students have this year obtained college research fellowships: Liana Chua (Gonville and Caius), Joanna Cook (Christ’s) and Jonathan Mair (St John’s).
Several members of the Department have achieved national and international marks of esteem. Professor Caroline Humphrey received the ‘Nairamdal’ (Friendship) Medal from the government of Mongolia; Dr Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, Curator (with Dr Olga Sosnina of the Kremlin Museum) of the 'Gifts to Soviet Leaders' exhibition (October-December 2006, Kremlin Museum, Moscow) received the award of the 'Museum Project of the Year' at the Inter-Museum Competition of the Russian Ministry of Culture; and Professor Marilyn Strathern received an honorary degree from Durham University.
Research
The Department has continued to obtain large research grants. These included ‘International science and bioethics collaborations: critical approaches to new knowledge relations’, a new three-year £1.5 million research collaboration in Social Anthropology between Professor Marilyn Strathern (as Principle Investigator) and Dr Monica Konrad, University of Cambridge, Dr Bob Simpson, Durham University, and Dr Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner, University of Sussex. The ESRC has contributed £1.2 million and will support two PhD studentships.
Members of the Mongolia & Inner Asia Studies Unit are expanding their research work in Inner Asia thanks to the success of three funding applications to the AHRC totalling £1.7 million at FEC: ‘Oral History of Mongolia’, a five-year co-operative research project between the MIASU and the International Association for Mongol Studies in Ulaanbaatar (Dr David Sneath, Dr Christopher Kaplonski and Professor Caroline Humphrey); 'The Historical Study and Documentation of the Pad gling traditions in Bhutan' (Dr Stephen Hugh-Jones, Dr James Laidlaw and Dr Hildegard Diemberger), five-year project with Dr Karma Phuntso as the researcher; 'Black Sea Currents' (Professor Caroline Humphrey with Dr Yael Navaro-Yashin and Dr Vera Skvirskaya), funded by the AHRC's Migration and Diasporas Programme for a three-year study.
Teaching
The Department will be introducing a new undergraduate option paper, Science and Society, in the 2008-09 academic year. The Department has over 70 students registered for the PhD and about 25 students on MPhil courses.
Further information on all of these areas of Department activity may be found on our website.
Full-time staff
Susan Bayly (PhD, 1980, Cambridge; Reader in Historical Anthropology; Fellow, Christ’s College): History and anthropology – interdisciplinarity, French and British colonialism, postcolonial religious and cultural transformations, colonial anthropology, caste; colonial and contemporary South Asia (India); colonial and contemporary Vietnam.
Barbara Bodenhorn (PhD, 1990, Cambridge; Newton Trust Lecturer, Pembroke College): '4th World' politics, knowledge practices (environmental and other); risk, decision-making, anthropology and economic relations; kinship; gender; the Arctic (N. Alaska); local sustainable development in rural Mexico (Oaxaca, Michoacan).
Uradyn E Bulag (PhD, 1993, Cambridge; Reader; Selwyn College): Comparative colonialism and imperialism (pan-Asianism; diplomacy; alter/native urbanisation); ethnicity and nationalism (hybridity; national unity; collaborative nationalism); (un)sharing cultures and histories (Mongolia-Tibet interface; politics of friendship; national heritage regimes; translingual practices); socialist/post-socialist political forms and imagination (minority revolution; autonomous institutions and laws; frontier films); East Asia (China, Japan, Taiwan) and Inner Asia (Mongolia, Tibet).
Matei Candea (PhD, 2006, Cambridge; Rausing Lecturer in Collaborative Anthropology; King’s College): Regionalism; education; racism; multiculturalism, universalism, and related theories of culture and society; political partisanship; epistemology; and the theory and practice of anthropological fieldwork; Europe (France).
Hildegard Diemberger (PhD, 1992, University of Vienna; Senior Associate in Research, Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit): Tibetan culture; local state dynamics and the impact of radical change on traditional communities; Landscape, space and time; local history and memory; changing notions of power and kinship; debates over continuity, tradition and modernity; Tibet.
Harri Englund (PhD, 1995, Manchester; Lecturer; Fellow, Churchill College): Ethnography; political philosophy; exile and borderlands; rural-urban migration; poverty and urbanisation; Pentecostal Christianity; political culture in Africa's new democracies; the theory and method of ethnographic description; human rights; witchcraft; language; Southern and East Africa (Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia).
Leo Howe (PhD, 1981, Edinburgh; Head of Department of Social Anthropology; Dean, Darwin College): Ritual, religion, hierarchy; work and unemployment, bureaucracy, the welfare state, ethnicity, urban studies; South-east Asia and Indonesia (Bali), Europe (N. Ireland).
Caroline Humphrey FBA (PhD, 1975, Cambridge; Rausing Professor of Collaborative Anthropology; Fellow, King’s College): Shamanism; theories of ritual; socialist/post-socialist economy and society; political forms; and the political imagination in east Asia; anthropology of the city; Asia (former USSR, Mongolia, China).
James Laidlaw (PhD, 1990, Cambridge; Lecturer; Fellow, King’s College): The interface between anthropological and ethical theory; religion and ritual, with special interest in Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism; theoretical approaches to religion including cognitive psychology; contemporary transformations in religions in Asia, including new forms of Buddhist self-formation; India (especially Rajasthan), East Asia (especially Inner Mongolia and Taiwan).
Sian Lazar (PhD, 2002, Goldsmith’s College, London; Lecturer; Fellow, Clare College): Ethnography of the state, democracy and citizenship; social movements; gender; the city; and the anthropology of politics and development; Latin America (specifically Bolivia).
Alan Macfarlane FBA (PhD, 1972, London; Professor of Anthropological Science; Fellow, King’s College): Historical anthropology; demographic anthropology; applications of information technology: the origins and implications of individualism and capitalism; England C15 C18, contemporary Nepal, Japan, China; the Gurungs of central Nepal; and the Nagas of the Burma-India border.
Perveez Mody (PhD, 2001, Cambridge; King's College): Anthropological theories about the constitution of castes and "communities" in India; the history of civil marriage law from the colonial into the post-colonial period; politics of religious nationalism; changes in South Asian kinship, marriage and urban sexuality (sexual relations, conjugality, gender and the family); law and human rights; an ethnography of South Asian marriage and kinship amongst two ethno-religious groups in East London; India, South Asia.
Yael Navaro-Yashin (PhD, 1998, Princeton; Lecturer; Fellow, Newnham College): Anthropology of politics; ethnography of the state; anthropology of law and human rights; theories of affect, psychoanalysis, and the anthropology of the emotions; space and place and the anthropology of cities; memory; social theory and political philosophy; Europe (Turkey, Cyprus), the Middle East.
David Sneath (PhD, 1991, Cambridge; Lecturer; Fellow, Corpus Christi College): The state, political culture and economic institutions in Inner Asia; the anthropology of development; pastoralism, land use and the environment; decollectivisation and post-Soviet social transformations; Inner Mongolia (China) and Mongolia, Inner and Central Asia.
Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (PhD, 1998, Stanford; Assistant Lecturer; Fellow, Sidney Sussex College): Northern Siberia, relation between indigenous peoples and the state; comparative colonialism; socialist and post-socialist economic systems, systems of taxation; anthropological theory; the anthropology of the former Soviet Union.
Dame Marilyn Strathern FBA (PhD, 1968, Cambridge; William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology; Mistress, Girton College): Gender theory; English kinship; reproductive technology; bioethics; intellectual and cultural property; issues in interdisciplinarity, the Pacific (Papua New Guinea), Europe (Britain).
Affiliated lecturers
Françoise Barbira-Freedman (Clare Hall): Medical Anthropology; shamanism; anthropology of childbirth and reproductive health; ethnobotany; ethnography of Western Amazonia (Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia).
Monica Bonaccorso-Rothe (Peterhouse): Anthropology of science and medicine (assisted conception, human cloning, stem cells, transgenic animals, xenotransplantation); anthropology of media and museums; bioethics and the production of knowledge; kinship, gender and the body; Fieldwork: Italy, Britain; Research interests: Europe/USA.
Paola Filippucci (New Hall): Space, place and landscape; memory, historicity, the cultural construction of the past; kinship and life narratives; gender, kinship and work; Europe (Italy, France).
Monica Konrad (Girton College): Anthropology of science and medicine, reproductive and genetic technologies, ethics of research relating to healthcare in developing countries, cross-cultural bioethics and the institutional contexts of science; Britain, Europe, South East Asia.
Maryon McDonald (Robinson College): Language and linguistics; medical anthropology; anthropology of science, biotechnology and ethics; political anthropology; anthropology and psychology; management; EU institutions and policies; Europe.
Martin T Walsh (Wolfson College): Anthropology of development and social change; development consultancy; Islam and politics; moral panics; science and rumour; ethnobiology and linguistics; Zanzibar, Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan, Liberia, Nigeria.
Anthropological staff at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
Mark Elliott (Assistant Curator for Anthropology): Collections research on photographs and artefacts from South Asia and the Pacific; museums and their publics; Hindu image worship; relationships between people and artefacts; histories of travel and collection in South Asia; South Asia (West Bengal).
Rebecca Empson (Leverhulme Research Associate; Wolfson College): Kinship, reincarnation, memory and learning, concepts of personhood, landscape and generation; Mongolia and Mongolians in London.
Anita Herle (MPhil, 1987, Cambridge; Senior Curator for Anthropology): Museum studies; art and representation; visual anthropology; history of anthropology; Torres Strait, Northwest Coast of Canada.
Amiria Salmond (PhD, 2001, Cambridge; Assistant Curator for Anthropology): Artefact based research in anthropology; visual anthropology; history of anthropology; New Zealand, the Pacific.
Anthropologists in other faculties and institutes, departmental associates, and emeritus members of the department
Ray Abrahams (Fellow, Churchill College): Kinship, politics, law, neighbourhood, age organisation; East Africa (Tanzania and Uganda), North and East Europe (Finland, Estonia). (Retired)
Mikiko Ashikari (Research Associate): Representation of body, memory and subjectivities; gender and ethnicity; fashion and tradition; life histories. (Japan)
Birgit Buergi (Research Assistant, PLACEBO): Advanced S&T capacity in developing world settings; North-South and South-South R&D collaborations; organisational ethnography; environmental knowledge, science and development.
Liana Chua (Research Fellow, Gonville and Caius College): Ethnic citizenship, cultural property, religious change and developmentalism in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo; artefact-oriented theory; museums and museology; early ethnographic photography; forms of anthropological knowledge.
Morgan Clarke (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow): Kinship, religion and morality; Islam and Islamic law; Shiism; the Middle East, especially Lebanon and Syria.
Paul Connerton (Research Associate): Body, space and memory; anthropological theory.
Joanna Cook (Lecturer, Pembroke College): Thai Buddhism; ascetic practice; anthropology of ethics and personhood; cultures of mindfulness: meditation techniques in psychology and monasticism.
Jacob Copeman (Research Fellow, Jesus College): Asceticism; popular Hinduism; kinship; ethics; nationalism; biomedical/religious interaction; India.
Gregory Delaplace (Research Associate): Relationships with dead people and "invisible things" in Mongolia; graves; ghosts; photography.
Robert Doubleday (Research Associate): Social implications of nanotechnology; social studies of science and technology; science governance and policy; ethnography of knowledge.
Susan Drucker-Brown (Research Associate): Kingship, ritual, ethnic conflict; history of anthropology; biography of Professor Meyer Fortes. Ghana, Mexico. Editor: Cambridge Anthropology.
Esther Goody (Reader Emeritus in Social Anthropology; Fellow, New Hall): Comparative studies, domestic organisation, socialisation, learning and authority, immigrants in the UK; West Africa (N. Ghana). (Retired)
Jack Goody (Emeritus Professor; Fellow, St John's College): West Africa; comparative and historical anthropology; Eurasia and Africa; communication; family; myth. (Retired)
Suzanne Hoelgaard (Research Associate): Social policy, development and child welfare, socialization, substitute care and identity; Britain, Colombia.
Stephen Hugh-Jones (Honorary Emeritus Associate): Oral narratives, ritual, shamanism and religion; human-animal relations and ecological anthropology; kinship and the anthropology of architecture; cultural politics and indigenous movements; linguistic anthropology and Amerindian languages; Latin/South America; fieldwork in Colombian Amazonia.
A Hürelbaatar (Research Associate, Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit): The language of politics; Mongolia.
Manpreet Janeja (Research Fellow, Girton College): Anthropology of food and material culture; legal anthropology; trust; Islam; India (Bengal), Bangladesh, UK.
Timothy Jenkins (Fellow, Jesus College, ADR in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies): Theory; religion, magic and ritual; land inheritance and nationalism; Western Europe (France and Britain).
Kriti Kapila (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow): Politics of recognition; legal anthropology, law and social theory; multiculturalism; anthropology of the state; historical anthropology; intimacy; pastoralism; South Asia.
Chris Kaplonski (Senior Research Associate, Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit): Memory; narrative; political violence; representation of violence; post-socialism; political anthropology. (Mongolia) Project Manager for "The Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia".
Adele Langlois (Research Associate, PLACEBO): Bioethics and genetics; international relations; collaborative anthropology.
Jonathan Mair (Research Fellow, St John’s): Contemporary Buddhism in Inner Mongolia; Mongolian Incarnations and their disciples; the ethics of self-cultivation; faith and the anthropology of ignorance.
Daniele Moretti (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow): Artisanal and small-scale gold mining; dreams; gender relations; environmental anthropology; Papua New Guinea.
Maja Petrovic-Steger (Research Fellow, Peterhouse College): Exploring the contexts where bodies - live; medically usable; and human remains - become the sites of economic, legal, political, scientific and artistic attention; post-conflict societies; Serbia, Tasmania, England.
Karma Phuntsho (Research Associate, Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit): Tibetan Buddhism and Bhutan; Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and practice; socio-cultural issues relevant to contemporary Bhutan. Currently studying the Younghusband collection of Tibetan books in the Cambridge University library.
Ruth Prince (ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow and Smuts Postdoctoral Fellow, African Studies Centre): AIDS and anti-retroviral therapy, biomedicine, religion, identity, kinship and gender relations; Kenya and East Africa.
Susanna Rostas (Senior Research Associate): Performance, dance; ethnicity, invented ethnicity and identity; popular culture; indigenous religion, religious conversion; art as process; Mexico (Chiapas and Mexico City).
Malcolm Ruel (Emeritus Fellow, Clare College): Comparative religion and ritual, politics; East and West Africa. (Retired)
Vera Skvirskaja (Research Associate): Working on projects ‘Exploring Post-Cosmopolitanism’ and ‘Black Sea Currents’ (AHRC grant, ‘Diaspora, Migration and Identities programme’).
Mark Turin (Research Associate; Director, Digital Himalaya Project; Queens’ College): Linguistic anthropology; anthropological linguistics; visual anthropology; ethnicity; digital technology in anthropology; archival practices; cultural property; journalism; Nepal; Tibet; Sikkim; Himalayas.
Piers Vitebsky (Assistant Director of Research, Scott Polar Research Institute): Anthropology of religion and psychological anthropology; shamanism; marginal ecologies (reindeer herding, shifting cultivation) and the state; Asia (Arctic Siberia, Tribal India).
Clarissa de Waal (Fellow, Newnham College): Post-socialist social and economic change (Albania): survival strategies, property relations, rural education.
Helen Watson (Fellow, St John’s College): Nationalism and conflict, gender; North Africa, Islam, Ireland.
Dr Lee Wilson (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) Nationalism and the body, security and sovereign practices, political violence, ICT and development, Islam and politics in Indonesia, Sufism in southeast Asia, creativity and innovation, anthropological theory and ethnographic practice. CRASSH