Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings

University of St Andrews

Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews, 71 North St, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL
W: http://ww.st-andrews.ac.uk/philosophy/anthropology/

Departmental report

There are currently 12 permanent members of staff at St Andrews - four professors (Gow, Dilley, Rapport and Toren), one reader (Platt), three senior lecturers (Crook, Gay y Blasco and Harris) and four lecturers (Frankland, Kresse, Reed and Wardle). We are glad to welcome back Dr Kai Kresse from his Research Fellowship at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. We are fortunate too to have on board a part-time teaching fellow (Bunn), an honorary research fellow (Ferraro) and a post-doctoral research fellow (Khosronejad) and very glad to be able to call on two distinguished retired members of staff (Overing and Riches). We are currently excited about new developments, specifically the founding of two new research centres: the Centre for Pacific Studies (Director, Christina Toren) which is due to host the conference of the European Society for Oceanists in 2010, and the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies (Director, Nigel Rapport); the latter has already attracted a research grant of £100k+ from the British Academy for its development. The two new research centres will work alongside the existing Centre for Amerindian Studies, the Centre for the Study of Knowledge and Ethics, and the Latin American and Caribbean Network (LACNET) as a focus of research activity in the Department, each one organising conferences, workshops and seminar series, as well as attracting distinguished overseas guests and affiliated researchers.

This academic year saw a number of significant events: a workshop on Epistemology for our research students (26 -27 September 2007) which followed a Wenner-Gren funded international symposium on the same subject at the Institute for Social Sciences, Lisbon (co-organised by João de Pina Cabral and Christina Toren), and which allowed us to bring to St Andrews two distinguished anthropologists: Jadran Mimica from Sydney University and Marcio Goldman from the Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro. From 4 to 6 October we were fortunate to receive Sidney Mintz, from John Hopkins, who gave three talks, the last of which formed his keynote address to the British Academy funded founding conference of LACNET (5-6 October 2007) on History, Writing and Creolization in the Americas (organised by Tristan Platt, Mark Harris and Huon Wardle); Verena Stolcke, Universidad Autonoma, was also a guest speaker. Our new Research Fellow, Pedram Khosronejad, was the prime mover behind our Wenner-Gren funded film festival ‘Visual Representations of Iran’ (13-16 June 2008) where we were pleased to be able to award a US$5,000 prize for the best student presentation (donated by the Houtan Foundation, USA).

Student numbers are good: some 180 first‑year undergraduates and some 60-90 second‑years (non‑specialists); our numbers of honours students have increased to about 90 (specialists); 30 postgraduates are registered for MRes degrees or doctorates. Our postgraduate training programme in cooperation with staff and students from the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow under an ESRC Research Development Initiative has been a great success; unfortunately ESRC funding for this STAR initiative has come to an end. We are all, however, determined to see the training programme continue. A relationship with the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Vienna and a consortium of other universities (Stockholm, Amsterdam, Brunel, Llubljana and Copenhagen), funded by the European Union, continues to provide an annual intensive programme in postgraduate instruction and a teacher exchange scheme.

Staff

Tony Crook, PhD, Senior Lecturer: Knowledge practices, ritual, gardening, mining, property rights. Papua New Guinea.

Stephanie Bunn, PhD. Part-time Teaching Fellow: Pastoral nomadism, material culture, human-environment relationships, learning and skill, childhood, space and perception, vernacular architecture. Central Asia.

Roy Dilley, PhD, Professor: Economic anthropology, cosmologies, crafts and artisans, politics and power. West Africa, Ireland and Scotland.

Emilia Ferraro, PhD, Honorary Research Fellow: Economy culture and religion; credit and debt transactions; development theories and practice; gender and development; feminist economy and epistemology; craft; skills and knowledge; apprenticeship; guilds and cofradías. The Andes.

Stan Frankland, PhD, Lecturer: Hunter gatherers, tourism & development, myths, representation. East Africa and Uganda

Paloma Gay y Blasco, PhD, Senior Lecturer: Feminist anthropology, sex and gender, gypsies, memory, marginality. Spain and Europe.

Peter Gow, PhD, Professor: Myth, history, kinship, aesthetics. Amazonia.

Mark Harris, PhD, Senior Lecturer: Identity, ecological anthropology, the anthropology of embodiment and experience, social science methodology. Brazilian Amazon and South America.

Pedram Khosronejad, PhD, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow: Death and dying, visual anthropology, nomadism and pastoralism, indigenous religions, material culture, and popular culture. Iran and the Islamic world.

Kai Kresse, PhD, Lecturer: Philosophy, religion, knowledge, intellectual practice, Islam, oral literature. Swahili coast, Eastern Africa, and the Western Indian Ocean.

Joanna Overing, PhD. Emeritus Professor: Egalitarianism, gender, linguistics, philosophical anthropology, indigenous cosmologies, aesthetics. Amazonia.

Tristan Platt, Reader. Director, Centre for Amerindian Studies: History, orality, literacy, colonialism, ethnicity, nationalism, the ethnography. Bolivia and the Andes.

Nigel Rapport, PhD, Professor. Director, Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies: Individuality, globalism, semantics, literary anthropology, consciousness and narrative. Yorkshire Dales, Newfoundland and Israel.

Adam Reed, PhD, Lecturer: Incarceration, literature and reading, new media and the city, London. Melanesia.

Dr David Riches, Honorary Senior Lecturer: Evolution and development, hunter-gatherers, violence and peace, social movements, the New Age. Canada and the circumpolar regions.

Christina Toren, PhD, Professor. Chair of Department.  Director, Centre for Pacific Studies. Exchange processes; sociality, kinship and ideas of the person; ritual; epistemology; ontogeny as an historical process. Fiji and the Pacific.

Huon Wardle, PhD, Lecturer: The West Indies and modernity, creolisation, comedy and mischief, imagination and perception. Kingston Jamaica.