Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE
W: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/anthropology/
Department Report
Staff
Martha Mundy and Deborah James were awarded personal Chairs in Anthropology, as was Tim Allen (Development Studies Institute DESTIN) in Development Anthropology. Henrietta Moore was awarded a three-year Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship commencing October 2007, and was appointed to the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology at Cambridge (from October 2008). Maurice Bloch formally retired in summer 2005 after 35 years at the LSE, but remains an active member of the department both in research and teaching. Professor Dan Sperber was appointed to a three-year Centennial Professorship (part-time, from October 2007) in the Department, and Professor Michael Lambek concludes his three-year half-time post in the Department in June 2008.
Dr Henrike Donner (2007-08) was appointed to a second one-year temporary lectureship (2007-08); Dr Amit Desai, Dr Wendy Coxshall, Dr Sandra Brunnegger, Dr Geoffrey Gowlland and Dr Nathaniel Roberts were awarded postdoctoral fellowships attached to the department by the ESRC; and Dr Fraser McNeill, Dr Ilana Van Wyk and Dr Goncalo Douro Dos Santos (half-time) were awarded LSE Fellowships. Dr Sawsan Assaf (Baghdad University) has Visiting Senior Fellow status with a British Academy Visiting Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Research
Deborah James was on sabbatical for the year, and gained a major ESRC award to study popular economies in South Africa. Laura Bear was awarded a two-year ESRC research grant to study neoliberal transformations of Kolkata’s Hooghly River (2008-09), and also an ESRC Research Seminars grant with Stephan Feuchtwang on the theme Conflicts in Time, to develop work on different and conflicting temporalities in various settings.
Dr Priya Narasimhan was awarded an ESRC Early Career Grant to pursue her research on Tamil Brahmins (together with Chris Fuller). Lucia Michelutti is coming to the end of her ESRC grant to study vernacular democracy in rural Venezuela. Véronique Beneï (Visiting Senior Fellow from CNRS) has embarked on new fieldwork in Colombia.
The LSE Programme in Culture and Cognition (PCC) is developing with Rita Astuti, Charles Stafford, Maurice Bloch, Dan Sperber, and colleagues in Social Psychology and Philosophy. Yael Navaro-Yashin (2007) and Emma Tarlo (2008) delivered the annual Malinowski lectures.
Alongside the weekly Friday research seminar, the department hosted regular seminars on Culture and Cognition, the Middle East, Africa, Central and Inner Asia and South Asia, and special workshops/conferences on the following:
London Anthropology Day (with UCL/Goldsmiths/SOAS/Brunel, 2007)
The Pitch of Ethnography (March 2008)
Rethinking Economies (with Goldsmiths January 2008)
Ethnography and Activism (with LSE Geography) March 2008
For a Sociology of India (July 2008)
London Anthropology: Current Research (with Goldsmiths, SOAS, UCL, Brunel) (June 2008)
Postgraduate training
The department currently has 57 PhD students. This year we have introduced a new training course – Ethnography in Relation to Other Research Methods – which our first year PhD (MSc or MPhil) take instead of the generic qualitative methods course offered by the LSE Methodology Institute. Furthermore, we have teamed up with UCL to offer a dedicated statistics course for these students, run by Dr Patrick Heady (statistician and anthropologist), to replace the generic course offered at LSE. We have continued with attempts to ensure that PhD students and researchers from the different London Departments get together and share research. In addition to several cross-college initiatives and seminars, the second day workshop embracing the whole of London anthropology takes place at Goldsmiths June 2008.
Teaching
The department currently runs a PhD exchange scheme with Columbia University Anthropology Department. A three-year collaborative research programme on digital learning together with Columbia University Anthropology Department concluded in 2006, and some of the findings and outcomes are available at the project website: www.lse.ac.uk/collections/anthropology/dart.htm. In addition to existing programmes, a new MSC China in Comparative Perspective was successfully launched in October 2006. While it is comparative and interdisciplinary in scope, it was an initiative of the department and is currently directed by Stephan Feuchtwang (Professorial Research Fellow).
Dept Staff List
Academic Staff
Dr Catherine Allerton: Eastern Indonesia; place and landscape, houses, kinship and marriage, childhood and schooling
Dr Rita Astuti: Madagascar; kinship, gender, anthropology of death, cognitive development and cultural transmission; ethnographic and experimental research methods
Dr Laura Bear: South Asia; historical anthropology, industrialisation, nationalism, modernity
Dr Fenella Cannell: Lowland Philippines, United States; anthropology of Christianity, healing and mediumship, gender, Mormonism and kinship
Dr Henrike Donner: India; gender and kinship, education, reproductive change, middle class lifestyles, urban space and politics
Dr Matthew Engelke: Zimbabwe; anthropology of Christianity, ritual and texts, history of anthropology, human rights
Professor Stephan Feuchtwang: China and Taiwan, Germany; Chinese popular religion, the anthropology of history, life stories, family myths and responses to catastrophic loss, comparison of civilisations and empires
Professor Chris Fuller: South Asia; India and Hinduism, South Indian temples, religion and politics, globalisation and information technology, Tamil Brahman society and history
Professor Olivia Harris: Latin America, the Andes; indigenous politics, anthropology of history, temporality, free and forced labour, kinship, gender, religion
Dr Deborah James: South Africa; political economy, civil society and the state, land reform and property regimes, development and migration, ethnicity, ethnomusicology, HIV/AIDS and reproductive health
Professor Michael Lambek: Madagascar, Mayotte, Switzerland; ritual, spirit possession, historicity, moral practice, curers, culture and selfhood
Professor Henrietta Moore: East and Central Africa; gender, sexuality, anthropology and epistemology, psychoanalysis and subjectivity, social theory
Dr Martha Mundy: Arab societies; law, agrarian systems, sociology of Islam, historical anthropology, kinship
Professor Jonathan Parry: South Asia; sociology of Hinduism, caste and other forms of inequality, industrialisation, labour and the anthropology of work
Dr Mathijs Pelkmans: Caucasus (Republic of Georgia), Central Asia (Kyrgyz Republic); anthropology of borders, political anthropology, anthropology of religion
Dr Michael W Scott: Melanesia; ontology, comparative cosmology, models of sociality, Christianity, ethnogenesis and postcolonial transformations of the nation-state, space and place
Professor Charles Stafford: China and Taiwan; learning, schooling and child development, cognitive anthropology, the relationship between learning and economic life
Research and LSE Fellows
Dr Wendy Coxshall (Research Fellow): Peru, the Andes; truth and reconciliation, kinship and family relations, gender and widowhood, social development, mining
Dr Amit Desai (Research Fellow): India; anthropology of religion, conversion, nationalism, witchcraft, food and eating, friendship
Dr Geoffrey Gowlland (Research Fellow): China; learning and skill acquisition, art and material culture
Dr Annu Jalais (Research Fellow): India, West Bengal; the environment, gender, the anthropology of animals
Dr Fraser G McNeill (LSE Fellow): South Africa; HIV/AIDS, music, poisonings, traditional leadership and female initiation, knowledge and experience
Dr Lucia Michelutti (Research Fellow): India, Venezuela; caste and race, religion, popular politics and socialism, historical anthropology and comparative colonialism
Dr Haripriya Narasimhan (Research Fellow): India; medical pluralism, globalisation, nationalism
Dr Nathaniel Roberts (Research Fellow):
Dr Goncalo Santos (LSE Fellow): China (South China in particular); kinship and sociality, modernity and social change, wet-rice farming and material culture, relation between culture, political economy and cognition
Dr Clarinda Still (LSE DART Fellow): India; education, gender, caste, Dalit politics
Dr Ilana van Wyk [LSE Fellow]: South Africa; religion, pentecostalism, witchcraft, money
Visiting Fellows
Dr Véronique Bénéï: Western India, Columbia; education and nationalism, civil society, violence
Dr Laurent Berger: Madagascar, Mali; politics and religion, kinship, cognition, globalisation, sacred kingship, possession cults, initiatory societies, history of anthropology
Julieta Gaztañaga MSc: South America, Argentina, Mercosur, political anthropology, ethnography, electoral processes, regional integration, social representations, rituals
Dr Evan Killick: Peru, Amazonia; Ashéninka society, sociality and self-identification, relatedness and friendship
Retired Academic Staff
Professor Maurice Bloch: Madagascar; religion and politics, cognitive anthropology, kinship
Professor Jean La Fontaine: East Africa, United Kingdom; kinship (children), incest, ritual, witchcraft and Satanism
Professor Ioan Lewis: Somalia and the Horn of Africa; shamanism, Islam and traditional societies, witchcraft and cannibalism
Professor Peter Loïzos: Cyprus; Greco-Turkish relations, refugee adaptation/health, ethnographic film
Dr James Woodburn: Sub-Saharan Africa; hunting and gathering societies, egalitarian political systems
