Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings
Cambridge University
Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF
Tel: 01223 334599; Fax 01223 335993;
email: socanth-admin@lists.cam.ac.uk web: www.socanth.cam.ac.uk,
Departmental Report
2010-2011 was the Department of Social Anthropology’s last year of existence, since in September 2011 it became a Division of the new Department of Archaeology and Anthropology. This was in many ways a difficult time; the Department was faced with administrative restructuring, the loss of experienced administrative staff, and the challenge of planning for the new Human Social and Political Science Tripos. Despite this, however, the Department’s last year proved to be another successful and active one. The Department obtained a number of research grants generating a total annual research income of £804.360, and continued to attract the highest calibre undergraduate and postgraduate students. Indeed, our Part II student numbers increased to 78, representing 47% of all Arch & Anth Part II students.
Division of Social Anthropology will continue the work of the Department with the same academic capacity as before.
Research
During the academic year October 2010 to September 2011, 17 research funding applications, to be hosted by the Department or its constituent Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (MIASU), were submitted, of which eight were successful and a considerable number remained under consideration.
Two applications for European Community funding submitted the previous academic year were awarded: Istvan Santha’s Marie Curie Incoming Fellowship (PI Dr Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov) ‘State, power and unaccountability in “Neo-Capitalist” East Russia: the case of Nephrite Business‘ to start in March 2012, and Dr Yael Navaro-Yashin’s Starting Investigator award ‘Living with remnants: Politics, materiality and subjectivity in the aftermath of past atrocities in Turkey’ which will start in January 2012 and run for five years.
AHRC network project ‘Climate Histories: Communicating cultural knowledge of environmental change’ hosted at MIASU in collaboration with the Department of Social Anthropology (Dr David Sneath and Dr Barbara Bodenhorn) was completed in mid-2011. Climate Histories Interdisciplinary Seminar continues this interest and provides a focus for further grant applications.
Dr Susan Bayly and Dr Nicholas Long obtained an ESRC award for their project ‘The Social life of achievement & competitiveness in Vietnam & Indonesia’, research to begin in 2011-12.
Dr Harri Englund was awarded a British Academy grant to begin a research project on ‘New communication technologies and genres of claim-making in Africa’. His monograph Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio was published by Indiana University Press.
Dr Uradyn Bulag’s book Collaborative Nationalism: the Politics of Friendship on China’s Mongolian Frontier (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010) won the International Convention of Asian Scholars 2011 book prize in social sciences.
Teaching and students
There were a total of 78 undergraduate students for Part IIA and Part IIB. The Department had a total of 64 research students.
The Cambridge University Social Anthropology Society (CUSAS), which is organised by a committee of undergraduate and graduate students, continued to enrich the academic life of the department through its weekly Thursday seminar. In addition, the society also organised a number of film showings. The CUSAS Annual Lecture was this year reinstituted as the ‘Marilyn Strathern Lecture’, and Professor Strathern was invited to give the inaugural lecture, speaking on the topic ‘Gifts money cannot buy’.
Graduate students have this year initiated masterclasses with members of the Departmental teaching staff (Professor Henrietta Moore and Dr Harri Englund). These masterclasses focus in depth on aspects of the research being carried out within the Department, and have the collegial goal of fostering intellectual and personal exchange between students and staff.
The 3rd issue of the student anthropology journal Imponderabilia was launched during the Easter Term. This journal, which is published through the initiative of undergraduate students in the Department, continues to bring together anthropology students throughout the world.
Staff
Professor Caroline Humphrey retired from the Sigrid Rausing Chair in Collaborative Anthropology.
Professor Kath Weston was appointed as Leverhulme Visiting Professor for one year from October 2011.
Dr Nayanika Mathur was appointed as a Temporary Lecturer for one year from October 2011.
Dr Richard Irvine was appointed as Department Assisted Teacher and Research Associate for the Climate Histories Project for one-Year from October 2011.
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).
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; Reader; Fellow, Churchill College): Human rights and the moral imagination; liberalism and inequality; African vernacular media and literature; law and morality; Christianity; the theory and method of ethnography; South-Central Africa (Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia).
Leo Howe (PhD, 1981, Edinburgh; Senior Lecturer; Dean, Darwin College): Ritual, religion, symbolism; hierarchy; cultural politics of new religious movements; violence and the state; Balinese transmigrants in Sulawesi; work and unemployment, bureaucracy, ethnicity, ideological forms; urban studies; South-east Asia and Indonesia (Bali), Europe (N.Ireland).
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, especially trade unions; gender; the city; and the anthropology of politics and development; Latin America (specifically Bolivia and Argentina).
Perveez Mody (PhD, 2001, Cambridge; Temporary Lecturer; Mellon Research Fellow): Love-marriage, 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; kinship in East London; India, South Asia, UK.
Henrietta L. Moore (PhD, 1986, Cambridge, William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, Professorial Fellow, Jesus College): Sexuality, gender, social transformation, ethics, new forms of self-fashioning, cosmopolitanism, culture and globalisation. Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Zambia)
Yael Navaro-Yashin (PhD, 1998, Princeton; Senior Lecturer; Fellow, Newnham College): Anthropology of politics; ethnography of the state; administrations, organizations, bureaucracies; anthropology of law; theories of affect, psychoanalysis, and the anthropology of the emotions; space and place and the anthropology of cities; social theory and political philosophy; anthropology of Europe and the Middle East, Turkey, Cyprus.
David Sneath (PhD, 1991, Cambridge; Reader; Head of Department of Social Anthropology from 01/10/09; 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; 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.
Affiliated lecturers
Françoise Barbira-Freedman (Clare Hall): Medical Anthropology; shamanism; anthropology of childbirth and reproductive health; ethnobotany; ethnography of Western Amazonia (Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia).
Simon Cohn (Girton College, Magdalene College): Medical anthropology; anthropology of science & STS; bioethics; cultural constructions of the self; applied and collaborative work; Britain, Europe.
Paola Filippucci (New Hall/Murray Edwards College): Space, place and landscape; memory, historicity, the cultural construction of the past; kinship and life narratives; gender, kinship and work; Europe.
Nicholas Long (Junior Research Fellow, St Catherine’s College): Secessionism, decentralisation and democratisation; cynicism and disillusionment; the anthropology of achievement; the uncanny; human resources; Malay identity; urban anthropology; Indonesia (specifically Riau); Singapore; the 'Malay World'.
Maryon McDonald (Fellow, Robinson College): Language and linguistics; medical anthropology; anthropology of science, biotechnology and ethics; political anthropology; anthropology and psychology; management; EU institutions and policies; Europe.
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).
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.
Nicholas Thomas (Director of the Museum and Professor of Historical Anthropology): History and art in the Pacific.
Departmental Associates and Anthropologists in other Faculties and Institutes
Mikiko Ashikari (Research Associate): Representation of body, memory and subjectivities; gender and ethnicity; fashion and tradition; life histories. (Japan)
Paul Connerton (Affiliated): Body, space and memory; anthropological theory.
Gregory Delaplace (Research Associate): Relationships with dead people and "invisible things" in Mongolia; graves; ghosts; photography.
Susan Drucker-Brown (Affiliated): Kingship, ritual, ethnic conflict; history of anthropology; biography of Professor Meyer Fortes. Ghana, Mexico. Editor: Cambridge Anthropology.
Suzanne Hoelgaard (Affiliated): Social policy, development and child welfare, socialization, substitute care and identity; Britain, Colombia.
A Hürelbaatar (Affiliated, Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit): The language of politics; Mongolia.
Manpreet Janeja (Research Fellow, Girton College): Anthropology of food and hospitality; collaborative anthropology; material culture; anthropology of place; legal anthropology; trust; 'multiculturalism'; popular Hinduism and 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).
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".
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 (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, African Studies Centre): AIDS and anti-retroviral therapy, biomedicine, religion, identity, kinship and gender relations; Kenya and East Africa.
Susanna Rostas (Affiliated): Performance, dance; ethnicity, invented ethnicity and identity; popular culture; indigenous religion, religious conversion; art as process; Mexico (Chiapas and Mexico City).
Sara Shneiderman (Research Fellow, St Catharine's): Ethnic, religious, gender and political identities; ritual practice; cultural production; cross-border migration; subjectivity and the state; indigenous rights and the politics of recognition; violence and conflict (South and East Asia; the Himalayas; Nepal, India, Tibet and China).
Mark Turin (Research Associate; Director, Digital Himalaya Project & World Oral Literature Project): Linguistic anthropology; anthropological linguistics; visual anthropology; ethnicity; digital technology in anthropology; archival practices; cultural property; 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.
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).
Esther Goody (Reader Emeritus in Social Anthropology; Fellow, New Hall): Comparative studies, domestic organisation, socialization, learning and authority, immigrants in the UK; West Africa (N. Ghana).
Jack Goody (Emeritus Professor; Fellow, St John's College): West Africa; comparative and historical anthropology; Eurasia and Africa; communication; family; myth.
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.
Dame Caroline Humphrey FBA (Rausing Professor Emeritus 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).
Alan Macfarlane FBA (PhD, 1972, London; Emeritus 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.
Dame Marilyn Strathern FBA (PhD, 1968, Cambridge; William Wyse Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology): Gender theory; English kinship; reproductive technology; bioethics; intellectual and cultural property; issues in interdisciplinarity, the Pacific (Papua New Guinea), Europe (Britain).