News

Showcase your Fieldwork PhotographsPostgraduates 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 spec…

A new exhibition at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology tells the story of how Asmat people of Papua, Indonesia, have transformed Catholicism in accordance with their ancestral ritual life.  An on-line tour is available on the University of Cambridge Museums' YouTube channel,  EBXiafDSFA&feature=youtu.beFor generations, Asmat people have neg…

The Department are delighted to announce that current PhD student Fred Wojnarowski has been awarded the IUAES Commission on Nomadic Peoples Best Student Essay Prize 2020 for his article 'The ghosts at the feast: contested settlement, land rights, and identity in the Jordanian Badiya’.  His article will be published in the upcoming issue of Nomadic …

The Department is delighted to share the news that our long-time colleague Professor Dame Caroline Humphrey, who was the first Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology in this Department, and founder of our Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, has recently received two awards. She received the Royal Anthropological Institute's 'Lifetime Ach…

We are delighted to welcome Dr Juan del Nido as the Philomathia ‘Ethics of Technology’ postdoctoral fellow to the Department and specifically to the Max Planck-Cambridge Research Centre. Juan recently completed an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship after his PhD, at the University of Manchester and he brings a fantastic range of ethnographic and geograph…

According to scientists and health professionals, the promise of early cancer detection is underpinned by three key ideas: cancer is more treatable if diagnosed early; medical and statistical technologies can sort populations according to clinical constructions of ‘cancer risk’; and targeted ‘populations’ are interested in engaging in practices of …

We are delighted to have three ESRC fellows in the Department in 2020-21.  Dr Sofia UgarteSince the turn of the century, Latin America has witnessed the displacement of millions of its inhabitants due to ongoing political instability, economic crises, violence, land scarcity, rapid urbanisation, and poverty in different countries of the region. In …

Recent MPhil student, Spencer Kaplan, has been awarded The Society for the Anthropology of Work’s Eric R. Wolf Prize, for his research entitled,’ 'Bringing Your Full Self to Work': The Fashioning of LGBTQ Bankers on Wall Street’.The prize recognises graduate student research on the topic of the anthropology of work, broadly defined. The prize is aw…

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology(CEA), has been expanding with a steady increase in entries as well as the addition of a new teaching resource.  The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology is a major outreach initiative from the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and it recently published its 50th entry.   The…

This edited collection examines the ways in which the emerging interdisciplinary study of care provokes a reassessment of the connections and disjuncture between care and governance, ethics, and public, personal and professional identities.  Featuring chapters by five anthropologists (Koreen Reece, Elena Khlinovskaya Rockhill, John Borneman, Tom Bo…

The new MPhil in Social Anthropological Research at the University of Cambridge provides specialist training in Social Anthropology to students with a first degree in the discipline, either on its own or as part of a joint degree. Applications are now open for the first cohort, starting in October 2021. The MPhil will consist of a core course on co…

Decolonising Anthropology: a new online resourceA collective of teaching staff and students at Goldsmiths, University of London have produced a new online resource to think about decolonisation and its relationship to anthropology as an academic discipline.The aim of the site (https://www.decolonialanth.co.uk/) is to host a dialogue about decolonis…

Ori Mautner has been named winner of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion student essay prize competition.The American Anthropological Association’s Society for the Study of Religion has named Ori Mautner, one of our current PhD students, winner of this year’s prize for the best student essay. Our warmest congratulations to Ori, who has jus…

Dr Jacinta Victoria Muinde wins the ASAUK Audrey Richards Prize 2020 for the best PhD dissertation in African Studies We are delighted to announce that one of our recent former graduate students has won a prestigious award for her PhD dissertation. Dr Jacinta Victoria Muinde, who studied for her PhD (2013-2018) at the Department of Social Anthropol…

How did homeless people and also the support services they depend on, cope during the Covid-19 pandemic and specifically the stay-at-home orders?Based on several months of fieldwork as a volunteer and numerous interviews in several institutions in the UK, Dr JohannesLenhard continued his work with homeless people, the main focus in his PhD.  In the…