News

The entries in this year’s 'Images Fresh from the Field' Graduate Photographic competition were all of a very high quality and the judges, Professor Caroline Humphrey and Dr Rupert Stasch, would like to thank all those who participated. The judges sought to evaluate the submissions according to the quality of their visual content, the sense of huma…

London Anthropology Day 2019We are taking part in London Anthropology Day (LAD), an annual university taster day for Year 12, 13, FE students, careers advisers and teachers. #LAD2019 will take place on Saturday 29th June 2019 at the Clore Education Centre, British Museum. Book your free place now: www.londonanthropologyday.co.uk

Dr Anthony J. Pickles: Money Games: Gambling in a Papua New Guinea TownGambling in Papua New Guinea, despite being completely absent prior to the Colonial era, has come to supersede storytelling as the region’s main nighttime activity. Money Games is an ethnographic monograph which reveals the contemporary importance of gambling in urban Papua New …

Ed Pulford: Mirrorlands: Russia, China and Journeys in Between  The China-Russia borderlands offer a unique vantage point from which to understand the myriad peoples, places and political cataclysms which have united and divided these two vast countries over time. As home to frontier-traversing tradespeople, cross-border indigenous groups, local po…

 The Department is pleased to announce that five of our number have been shortlisted in the Lecturer and Supervisor categories of the 2019 CUSU student-led teaching awards:LecturerDr Matei CandeaDr Yael NavaroUndergraduate Supervisor (Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences)Dr Joe EllisDr Patrick McKearneyDr Perveez ModySee the full short list on the …

The Department is experimenting with ways in which to build connections with our alumni and friends. We have begun a series of events, entitled ‘Anthropology, Beyond the Academy’, in which speakers from a diverse range of fields describe and reflect on the ways in which having studied anthropology has informed their work. Our first speakers have be…

Dr Ignacia Arteaga Probably most of us know someone affected by cancer. Millions of pounds are spent every year on cancer research to reduce the prevalence and seriousness of the many cancers that affect people living in the UK. Practices of biomedical innovation are expanding the frontiers of this research towards what is seen as the ‘natural hist…

Dr Nurul Huda Mohd RazifPostdoctoral Affiliate, Department of Social AnthropologyResearch Fellow, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, NLNurul first came to the Department of Social Anthropology as a doctoral candidate in 2013, and defended her PhD, entitled “Halal Intimacy: Love, Marriage, and Polygamy in Contemporary Malaysia”, in a…

This collection of new and previously published work by David Sneath, Director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, explores the historical processes that have made and remade Mongolia as it is today: the construction of ethnic and national cultures from the aristocratic orders of the past; the transformations of political economy and ‘noma…

What can this tell us about memory, about the contemporary resurgence of the far-right, and about the concept of ‘everyday life’ itself?Dr Paolo HeywoodMy current work explores these questions in a small town called Predappio in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna. What makes it ‘extraordinary’ (and indeed infamous, for many) is the fact that Beni…

Professor Nick Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of CambridgeThe project was innovative in its conception and approach, being based in sustained dialogue with Islanders – artists, scholars,  community members – from across the Pacific, over many years. While most such exhibitions adopt a regional approach, r…

Postgraduates in Social Anthropology are invited to enter this year’s Graduate Photographic Competition to have their work displayed in the Department and have the chance to win a Heffers book voucher (First Prize £75, Second Prize £50 and Third Prize £25).    Photos will be judged on quality and content, with special consideration given to images …

Research Exploring Nature-Based and Alternative Medicine in MongoliaOver the past 8 years, Dr Elizabeth Turk, MIASU Research Associate, Department of Social Anthropology, has been exploring  the increased popularity of nature-based and ‘alternative’ medicine in post-Soviet Mongolia. During a time described as 'disorganised’ (_zambaraagui_), marked …

Why and how do social and cultural anthropologists make comparisons? What problems do they encounter in doing so, and how might these be resolved? What, if anything, makes one comparison better than another? This book answers these questions by exploring the many ways in which, from the nineteenth century to the present day, comparative methods hav…

Indeterminacy: Waste, Value, and the Imagination Edited by Catherine Alexander and Andrew SanchezWhat happens to people, places and objects that do not fit the ordering regimes and progressive narratives of modernity? Conventional understandings imply that progress leaves such things behind, and excludes them as though they were valueless waste. Th…