Senior Seminar

Dr Nurul Huda Mohd Razif (Leiden University) The Death of a Polygynist, and Its Aftermath in a Malaysian Syariah Court The unexpected passing of a Malay polygamist without a clear will threw his four surviving widows and 33 children into a state of utter turmoil. Divided loyalties between the wives and their children and...

Dr Iza Kavedžija (University of Exeter) The work of hope in a Japanese mutual aid network In contemporary urban Japan, widespread anxieties about aging and an increasing sense of hopelessness or alienation have led a number of people to start mutual aid networks. This paper explores one such network, in a downtown...

Dr Jakob Klein (SOAS) Eating potatoes is patriotic! State, market and the common good in contemporary China Ethical food consumption has typically been addressed by scholars in the context of alternative food movements, and debates have revolved around the role of capitalist markets in furthering or appropriating these...

Freddy Foks (University of Cambridge) Constructing the field in colonial Africa: power, persona and paper tools How did inter-war social anthropologists go about trying to understand a ‘whole society’? This paper draws on archival sources to reveal the research methods, political contexts and inter-personal relations that...

Dr Elizabeth Turk, (University of Cambridge) From State Spirit to Homeland: Modernist Cosmologies and Territorialized State Reverence in Post-Soviet Mongolia While the interrelation and irreducibility of Mongolian politico-economic and cosmological forms have been illustrated (Pedersen 2011; High 2017; Empson 2018) this...

Dr Nick Evans , (London School of Economics) How do you prove you’re Muslim? Evidence, proof and doubt at the margins of Indian Islam

Dr Julienne Obadia (University of Cambridge) Settling Intimate Accounts: Contracts and the Shifting Labor of Love in American Late Liberalism This talk examines how the pressures of the contemporary mandate to do what one loves – and to love everything one does – shapes ways of imagining experiments in collective life in...

Dr Natalia Buitron-Arias , (London School of Economics) The Moral Force of Community Assemblies: towards a Non-coercive Theory of Statecraft Anthropologists often imagine the originality of Amazonian politics against the spectre of state politics, an analytical strategy that evokes Clastres’s influential characterisation...

Prof Didier Fassin ( Institute for Advanced Study École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) Anti Anti-Humanism Notes on the Social Life of Things in Prison Things have become a major topic of inquiry in the social sciences and humanities. Whereas the post-human turn and its anti-humanist approach have tended to oppose...

Dr Barbara Bodenhorn, (University of Cambridge) Fragments of intimacy and reassembling relations The turn to 'Intimacy', as the subject of anthropological inquiry, has covered much the same ground as 'kinship' with its attention to the social relationships which form through bonding and moral obligation. The not straight-...