CUSAS Event

This event is for Department of Social Anthropology students and staff.

Prof Joel Robbins (University of Cambridge) On the prospects for a comparative study of the good: Beyond the bad and the ugly in anthropological relativism In her influential recent article on “Dark Anthropology,” Sherry Ortner questions the critical potential of anthropological studies of ethics, and particularly of...

Dr Nick Long (LSE) Troubleshooting the human laptop: Thinking through undesirable behaviours in the company of anthropologists, philosophers, and Indonesian hypnotherapists To be active on Indonesia’s hypnosis circuit is to stand at the forefront of a movement grappling with complex questions regarding the nature of human...

Film Screening: Broken Gods Followed by Q&A with Co-Director Dr Alice Tilche, LSE India has one of the largest populations of indigenous people in the world, known locally as tribals or adivasis. They number more than a 100 million people, speak more than 800 different languages and are among the poorest people on the...

Masterclass: Dr Ruba Salih (SOAS) What is anthropology for? Reflections from fields of protracted suffering Under neoliberal imperatives, academic research and knowledge production is increasingly assessed against its ability to produce profit rather than critical thinking. On the one hand, having to justify its existence...

Brown Bag Lunch with Dr Joe Ellis Join us this Wednesday for our first Brown Bag Lunch of the year with Dr Joe Ellis, in the Meyer Fortes room, Department of Social Anthropology, from 1-2 pm. Brown Bag Lunches are an informal, relaxed way to get to know members of our Department, and ask them about their research interests...

Cambridge Film Festival: Atlantics A film by Mati Diop (Arts Picturehouse tickets are £11.50) With Mama Sané, Amadou Mbow, Ibrahima Traoré 'Ada, 17, is in love with Souleiman, a young construction worker. But she has been promised to another man. Harnessing fantasy and social relevancy in this haunting tale of love...

Dr Kelly Fagan Robinson (University of Cambridge) Thoughts as space: Deaf story-telling as cosmogenesis Visual Vernacular ﴾'VV'﴿ is a formal narrative praxis through which deaf performers externally map thoughts‐in‐space, constructing weather, creatures, people, landscapes, emotions, and musings made manifest using their...

Dr Megan Laws (LSE) Demanding the capacities of others: How ancestors and shamans govern opacity in the Kalahari Among Ju|'hoan speakers today, a tension exists between the need to 'give thought' to relatives and to give in to broader pressures to share. Where the former brings people home to their families and territories...

Welcome Social (After Prof. Veena Das SMUTS lecture)