News

Every year, the Department awards a prize of £200 to the most outstanding IIB dissertation. The prize is named in memory of Dr Sue Benson (1948-2005), an anthropologist who lectured, supervised and directed studies in Cambridge for 26 years and who was an inspiration, both personally and intellectually for generations of students.We are pleased to …

Prof David Sneath's fascinating research was explored recently in a BBC World Service radio programme entitled,  Heart and Soul: Consulting the Oracle.Listen to the programme here

Alumna’s passion for Amazonia inspires new lectureship Inspired by passionate teaching as an undergraduate at Cambridge and by her involvement with groups working to protect the rights of indigenous peoples, alumna Jessica Sainsbury has endowed a new lectureship in the Anthropology of Amazonia. Building on the legacy of renowned scholar Stephen Hug…

 The Department is very sad to learn of the death, on 13th January 2020 at the age of 81, of our long-time and dearly remembered former colleague, Dr Gilbert Lewis. Gilbert was a pioneer in the development of medical anthropology as well as a distinguished ethnographer of Papua New Guinea and theorist of ritual and magic. Colleagues who were taught…

We are very happy to announce the winners of the first Max Cam seminar and mobility grants.For the seminar grants we gave out two awards of £2,500 this term.  First, Liangliang Zhang and Ori Mautner are going to put together a workshop entitled ‘Self-Fashioning in Flux: The Entanglement of Interiorities with Political and Economic Changes’ in Lent …

Everyday Justice clearly demonstrates the value of revitalizing the category of justice in ethnographic work by revealing how  both justice and injustice are woven into everyday life in manifold and widely differing ways. The contributors account for this complexity across multiple particular social relations, places, and times, such that concepts …

What is censorship? How does it stand out amongst other ways of silencing oneself and others? And what light can anthropological comparison shed on this question?Matei Candea has edited a special issue of the open access journal Terrain on the anthropology of censorship. Contributors include department members Susan Bayly (read her article on citiz…

A remarkable public media project showcasing the work of young anthropologists in contemporary Vietnam has just celebrated its second anniversary of full-scale operation. The project, entitled ‘Anthropology for today's Vietnam: An online public communication initiative,’ is the brainchild of our former PhD student Dr. Lam Minh Chau, now Senior Lect…

John Fahy: Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City centers on a growing multinational community of ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) devotees in Mayapur, West Bengal. While ISKCON’s history is often presented in terms of an Indian guru ‘transplanting’ Indian spirituality to the West…

Dr Baktygul Tulebaeva: Visiting Academic to the Department of Social AnthropologyThe Department is pleased to announce the arrival of Dr Baktygul Tulebaeva, a social anthropologist at the Goethe University Frankfurt, who is visiting until early December. Her recent post-doctoral project is on Sufism in India where she investigates Sufi shrines, tra…

Johannes Lenhard & Farhan Samanani (Eds): Home: Ethnographic EncountersHow are notions of 'home' made and negotiated by ethnographers? And how does the researcher relate to forms of home encountered during fieldwork?Rather than searching for an abstract, philosophical understanding of home, this collection asks how home gains its meaning and signif…

John Fahy and Jan-Jonathan Bock (Eds): The Interfaith Movement: Mobilising Religious Diversity in the 21st CenturyAlthough its beginnings can be traced back to the late 19th century, the interfaith movement has only recently begun to attract mainstream attention, with governments, religious leaders and grassroots activists around the world increasi…

Dr. Sertaç Sehlikoglu has been awarded a ERC Starting Grant (€1.5million ) for a major new research project entitled  “Imaginative Landscapes of Islamist Politics Across the Balkans-to-Bengal Complex”. She is a Cambridge-trained social anthropologist specialised in gender and subjectivity in the Middle East and in Islamicate contexts. She completed…

The Department congratulates Professor Harri Englund on his election tothe British Academy. Each year, the British Academy elects to itsFellowship UK-based scholars who have achieved academic distinction asreflected in scholarly research activity and publication. Moreinformation on Professor Englund's work can be found on Professor Englund's profil…

Every year, the Department awards a prize of £200 to the most outstanding IIB dissertation. The prize is named in memory of Dr Sue Benson (1948-2005), an anthropologist who lectured, supervised and directed studies in Cambridge for 26 years and who was an inspiration, both personally and intellectually for generations of students.We are pleased to …