Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings
University of St Andrews
Department of Social Anthropology, School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies
T: 01334 462977 W: www.st-andrews.ac.uk/anthropology/
Departmental report
Anthropology at St Andrews continues to thrive. We have made two new appointments in the past year – Dr Stephanie Bunn and Dr Mattia Fumanti. Dr Fumanti takes up in August 2010 the post vacated by Dr Kai Kresse who left us for Berlin, while Dr Bunn’s is a new permanent post. Dr Fumanti is an Africanist, who has done fieldwork both in Namibia and among Akan-speaking Ghanaians in London. Dr Bunn worked among pastoral nomads in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia and is an expert on material culture and art. We are pleased too to have had the services of Pacific specialist Dr Will Rollason for two years, replacing Prof. Roy Dilley who took up a three-year post as Dean of the Arts Faculty; Dr Rollason leaves us for a permanent post at Brunel. Prof. Christina Toren continues as Chair of the Department; she will step down from this post in February 2010, when it will be taken up by Dr Mark Harris.
The department offers single honours and joint honours degrees in Anthropology as well as the MRes in Anthropology, the MRes in Anthropology with African Studies, and the MRes in Anthropology with Pacific Studies.
Our current MPhil/PhD research students number around 36, with the majority doing fieldwork in Africa, Europe, South America and the Pacific. Five students graduated with PhDs in 2010. The Scotland-wide postgraduate training consortium in anthropological research (the STAR Programme), which takes in the universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews has proved a great success. The programme is set to continue and is much appreciated by students from all the participating universities.
Social Anthropology at St Andrews is host to three research Centres. The Centre for Amerindian Studies (CAS), director Prof. Tristan Platt, continues to attract significant numbers of research students; its present research interests include the history and anthropology of the South-Central and Ecuadorean Andes, the Lower Amazon, the Peruvian Upper Amazon and pre-Andean region, and the Caribbean. In addition to its lively regular seminar series CAS hosts events such as the September 2009 workshop entitled Bodies: ethnographic perspectives from South America. CAS is associated with LACNET, an interdisciplinary research network that links the University’s different Schools and Departments; LACNET also links with the wider Latin American and Latin Americanist community through its articulation with other regional networks in Scotland and North-East England (LASNET-NES, which includes the Americas Research Group of the University of Newcastle), and the Latin Americanist and Caribbeanist Institutes, Centres and lobbies of the South.
The Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies (CCS), director Prof. Nigel Rapport was launched in 2007 with a British Academy grant of £100,000. CCS exists to explore the implications and possibilities of Cosmopolitanism, which is understood as compassing the complexity of global social and cultural settings, the experience of the individual citizen, and the openness of a just society. Its postdoctoral fellows have been Doctor Laura Jeffery, Doctor Hideko Mitsui and Dr Morten Nielsen. In September 2009 CCS hosted a two-day international conference, A Cosmopolitan Anthropology? It discussed the meanings of cosmopolitanism in anthropology and the possibilities for a cosmopolitan anthropology. Speakers included Ulf Hannerz, Keith Hart, Karen Fog Olwig and Pnina Werbner and others. And in March 2010 the Centre hosted a three-day workshop convened by Dr Morten Nielsen entitled Urban Times: A Cosmopolitan Approach to the City.
The Centre for Pacific Studies (CPS), director Prof. Christina Toren, was also launched in 2007. CPS has PhD students working in Papua New Guinea, Tonga, the Solomon Islands and Fiji. The Centre was honoured in 2009 by a visit from Mrs Taufa Vakatale of Fiji – a distinguished, delightful and much admired guest to whom the University of St Andrews awarded an Honorary Doctorate for services to women of Fiji and the Pacific. Academic visitors have included Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor James F. Weiner who spends some months with us each academic year from 2008-10; he is an international expert on resource development and native title in Papua New Guinea and Australia. 2008-09 saw CPS’s first annual colloquium on Pacific anthropology bringing together scholars in the UK and Europe. The Centre invited the University of Bergen’s Pacific Research Group for the first of a series of workshops entitled North Sea, South Seas: Research Futures in Pacific Studies. This has since become an annual colloquium whereby Pacific research staff of the two departments get together with all their research students in either St Andrews or Bergen and spend two to three days in discussion of their current and proposed research. In December 2009, in affiliation with the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, CPS collaborated on an interdisciplinary symposium and workshop series, From Missionising to Militourism: Anglo-American imperialism and the Pacific Imaginary , funded by the British Academy and the Association of Commonwealth Universities. In July 2010 the Centre was host to the highly successful 8th conference of the European Society for Oceanists (ESfO) when 280 delegates from all over the world gathered in St Andrews to discuss all things Pacific. CPS has negotiated an ESfO book series with Berghahn Books for publications arising from the conference.
The department has also seen the development of the Anthropology of Iran. Post-doctoral research fellow, Dr Pedram Khosronejad organised two one-day workshops. The first, in collaboration with the Institute of Iranian Studies (Univ. of St-Andrews) and French Institute in Edinburgh, took place in December 2009 on Sunni-Shi'i Mausoleums and Saint Veneration in the Turko-Persian World and the second in collaboration with Prof. P. J. Luizard (Groupe Societes, Religions, Laicites (CNRS/Paris) in April 2010 on Sunni-Shii Mausoleums and Saint Veneration in Iraq and Neighbouring Countries.
Full-time teaching staff
Dr Stephanie Bunn, Lecturer.
Pastoral nomadism, material culture, human-environment relationships, learning and skill, childhood, space and perception, vernacular architecture.
Dr Tony Crook, Senior Lecturer.
Papua New Guinea. Anthropology of Melanesia, knowledge-practices, 'secrecy', male initiation ritual, taro horticulture, anthropological epistemology, impacts of and responses to the Ok Tedi mine, machine-thinking, perpetual motion, genetic engineering, climate change.
Professor Roy Dilley, Dean of Arts
Economic anthropology, cosmologies, crafts and artisans, politics and power, and the ethnography of West Africa, Ireland and Scotland.
Dr Stan Frankland, Lecturer
East Africa and Uganda. Hunter Gatherers, Tourism & Development, Myths, Representation.
Dr Mattia Fumanti, Lecturer
Namibia and the African diaspora in the U.K.
Dr Paloma Gay y Blasco, Senior Lecturer.
Feminist Anthropology, Sex and Gender, Gypsies, Memory, Marginality.
Professor Peter Gow
Amazonia. Myth, history, kinship, aesthetics.
Dr Mark Harris, Senior Lecturer
Brazilian Amazon and South America. Identity, ecological anthropology, the anthropology of embodiment and experience, social science methodology.
Professor Tristan Platt
South America, Andes, Bolivia. Language, writing and politics; history and anthropology; liberalism and rebellion; textuality and silence; myth, memory and archive; colonialism, postcolonialism and ethnogenesis; mining, metallurgy and money; migration.
Profdessor Nigel Rapport
Yorkshire Dales, Newfoundland and Israel. Individuality, globalism, semantics, literary anthropology, consciousness and narrative.
Dr Adam Reed, Senior Lecturer
Melanesia. Incarceration, literature and reading, new media and the city, London.
Professor Christina Toren
Fiji and the Pacific, Melanesia. Exchange processes; spatio-temporality as a dimension of human being; sociality, kinship and ideas of the person; the analysis of ritual; epistemology; ontogeny as a historical process.
Dr Huon Wardle, Lecturer
Jamaica and The West Indies. Modernity, cosmopolitanism, creolisation, comedy and mischief, imagination and perception.
Research Fellows
Dr Pedram Khosronejad
The Goli Rais Larizadeh Fellowship of the Iran Heritage Foundation for Anthropology of Iran
Iran, Persianate societies, and the Middle East
Dr Morten Nielson, Post-Doctoral Research fellow in Cosmopolitan Studies
Peri-urban areas of Maputo, Mozambique. House design, building ontological perspectives; socio-economic effects of Chinese infrastructure projects in Mongolia and Mozambique.
Prof. James F Weiner, Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor of Social Anthropology, 2008-2010, Centre for Pacific Studies
Consulting anthropology: Australian Aboriginal Native Title and Cultural Heritage; Landowner Identification and Social Mapping in Papua New Guinea; Myth, poetry, territoriality.
Research Associates
Professor Joanna Overing, Emeritus Professor
Egalitarianism, gender, linguistics, philosophical anthropology, indigenous cosmologies, aesthetics, and the ethnography of Amazonia.
Dr David Riches, Honorary Senior Lecturer
Evolution and development, hunter-gatherers, violence and peace, social movements, the New Age, and the ethnography of the Canadian Inuit and the circumpolar regions.