Senior Seminar

Professor Guido Sprenger (Heidleberg University) Expectations of the gift and the introduction of Buddhist endowments This talk presents and tentatively applies an approach to transactions that is based on their future orientation. Replacing the Maussian obligations with expectations offers a perspective on exchanges that...

Dr Rosie Jones McVey (University of Exeter) Learning From The Herd?: Ethics and Intercorporeality in Equine-Assisted Therapy The term 'intercorporeality' has gained currency in many spheres of political discourse, as a way of envisioning a form of ethics and politics that would be rooted in embodied responsiveness and...

Professor Yael Navaro (University of Cambridge) Catastrophe and More-than-Human Worlds ‘Memory’ has been the overarching framework for anthropological studies of political violence in its long durée. But, until more recently, ‘memory’ was conceptualised in a human-centred way, with works on loss, trauma, their social...

Dr Christine Lee (East China Normal University) A Handful of Grass: Catholicism and Anthropology via Evans-Pritchard, Turner and Douglas Catalysed by Vatican II's radical reforms and theology, which pursued more historically, culturally, and experientially-grounded approaches to faith, Mary Douglas (cradle Catholic, and E...

Dr Courtney Handman (University of Texas at Austin) Channels of modernity: imaginaries of colonialism and decolonization in Papua New Guinea In this presentation, I argue that modernist discourses of circulatory primitivity have shaped projects of both colonialism and decolonization. Defined in opposition to classic...

Dr Meredith McLaughlin (University of Cambridge) Unravelling the story of an Indian grocery collective: An iterative account In this talk, I trace the lived experience of India’s variegated development landscape: a complex constellation of state, private sector, and civil society actors. I explore this political economic...

Professor Morgan Clarke (University of Oxford) and Dr Ali-Reza Bhojani (University of Birmingham) Provincializing virtue: dissolving anthropological piety in the ocean of Islam In this seminar we reflect on some of our recent collaborative work together. Our collaboration is both interdisciplinary and interpositional, one...

Dr Federico Neiburg (National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) Inflation – Pragmatics of money and inflationary sensoria The recent transformation of inflation into a first-order global issue invites us to update the anthropological agenda on the theme. The combination of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic...

Dr Victor Cova (University of Cambridge) Woke Religion, the Cult of Humanity, and Durkheim in Amazonia In Woke Racism: A New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, James McWhorter writes that "an anthropologist would not recognise a difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism." Thus convoked...

Dr Michael Degani (University of Cambridge) Parasites, Invention, and Grace: Taking Turns in a Streetcorner Bureaucracy This talk analyzes styles of work and conflict amongst a group of “contractors” that congregate outside—and intercept the customers of—an electrical utility office in urban Tanzania. Tempering depictions...