News

Ethnographic Plague: Configuring Disease on the Chinese-Russian FrontierDr Christos LynterisChallenging the concept that since the discovery of the plague bacillus in 1894 the study of the disease was dominated by bacteriology, Ethnographic Plague argues for the role of ethnography as a vital contributor to the configuration of plague at the turn o…

Drowning in a paper sea: India’s welfare efforts failed by its peculiar bureaucracyIndia’s sophisticated laws and progressive policies fail with startling regularity. A new study locates a possible reason as to why in the convoluted bureaucratic system of the Indian state and its obsession with paper. One of the world’s largest anti-poverty measure…

 We are pleased to announce the 2016 LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology/Bloomsbury First Book Competition was won by Dr Felix Stein of the Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Felix is one of three winners of this competition, which supports early career anthropologists who are raising innovative questions vital to the disci…

Winner: Theodore Park (King’s College) Every year, the division awards a prize of £200 to the most outstanding IIB dissertation. The prize is named in memory of Dr Sue Benson (1955-2005), an anthropologist who lectured, supervised and directed studies in Cambridge for 26 years and was an inspiration both personally and intellectually for generation…

 The Division of Social Anthropology is delighted to announce the election of the eighth William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, to succeed Professor Henrietta Moore, who was preceded in turn by Professors Marilyn Strathern, Ernest Gellner, Jack Goody, Meyer Fortes, J. H. Hutton, and T. C. Hodson.James Laidlaw has taught for many years at th…

 Winner: Martin Freimüller (Trinity College)Ten entries were received, all of them prepared to high standards. The quality and diversity of proposed dissertation projects are, as in previous years, very impressive. Thematically, they address various aspects of the arts, media, politics, religion and activism. Regionally, projects are proposed in th…

It is with the deepest regret that we record the untimely death of Jo Cox (née Leadbeater), who came up to Cambridge in 1992 taking her Part I in Archaeology and Anthropology then Social and Political Science. She graduated in 1995 and was elected to Parliament as Labour Member for Batley and Spen at the 2015 General Election.Our deepest condolence…

 We are pleased to announce that Chloe Nahum-Claudel has just been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship which she will hold at the London School of Economics from March 2017. Her research project is entitled  ‘Intimate Witchcraft: forging human life between unseen and phenomenal worlds’.Here is what she says about the grant:The grant …

 We're delighted to announce that from October 2016 Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu will be the Abdullah Mubarak Al-Sabah Research Fellow in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Pembroke College.Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu is a social anthropologist working on gender and subjectivity specialised on Turkey and the Middle East. She analyses human subjectivity in rela…

Caroline Humphrey and Rupert StaschMay 15, 2016The ten entries in this year’s “Images Fresh from the Field” competition were all richly deserving of awards, and it was very difficult to choose among them. The judges sought to evaluate the submissions according to their technical, aesthetic, and epistemological features, their visual communication o…

 We are very pleased to announce that Dr Richard Irvine is one of this year’s winners for the student led, CUSU Teaching Awards 2016.Now in their third year, the CUSU Student-Led Teaching Awards are a unique opportunity for students to recognise the exceptional contribution those who teach and support them have made to their education. The Awards a…

 There’s no such thing as a natural-born gamblerby Dr Anthony PicklesThis short article aimed at a general audience shows that while gambling is thought to be a ubiquitous part of human nature, this is just a fiction borne out of familiarity. Many parts of the world didn't have gambling, at least until the last 150 years, and sometimes much sooner.…

 In 2015-16, the Division of Social Anthropology welcomed Dr Eduardo Dullo as a visiting Postdoc.Before going to Cambridge, where I was planning to stay for one year, I did what any traveller should do: I asked those who had already been there what to expect. A former professor gave me some relevant advice: to be on time, as Brazilians have their o…

 We're delighted to announce that Dr Andrew Sanchez will be joining us in September 2016 as a new University Lecturer.Dr Sanchez, who took his PhD at the London School of Economics in 2009, is the author of Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India (Routledge, 2015), which describes and analyses the effects of institution…

Dr Matei Candea is one of this year’s Pilkington Teaching Prize winners. Twelve inspirational academics have been recognised for their outstanding quality and approach to teaching. The winners, listed below, will attend an awards ceremony at Queens’ College in June, where they will receive a prize from the Vice-Chancellor.The Pilkington Prizes are …