Senior Seminar

Dr Thomas Strong (Maynooth University) Do Witches Have Human Rights? A remarkable shift has occured in how we talk about witchcraft and sorcery. Whereas these topics have long occasioned critical reflection on belief and reason, or cultural difference and human universals, the new discourse describes witchcraft as a “human...

Dr Matteo Benussi (University of Cambridge) Ethics and Emancipation: An Autonomist Reading of Russia’s Islamic Revival and Other Forms-of-Life This paper seeks to investigate the politics of ethics – and, specifically, to explore the emancipatory potential of collective projects of self-cultivation – by drawing on a...

Dr Luke Heslop (London School of Economics) Putting the house in order: Notes on managing men and exorcising ghosts in Sri Lanka “When sorrows come, they come not single spies. But in battalions!” (Hamlet act 4, scene 5) The ethnographic material I present in this paper is oriented around solving problems within the homes...

Professor Gísli Pálsson (University of Iceland) Awkward Ecologies: The Great Auk, Extinctions, and the Anthropocene This paper draws attention to the fate of the Great Auk ( Alca impennis ), a flightless bird which apparently became extinct on Eldey, South-West Iceland, by the middle of the nineteenth century. I shall...

Dr Anni Kajanus (University of Helsinki) Who will yield? - Children’s understanding of dominance and prestige in China and in the UK From an early age, children start to understand status processes in their social environments. Findings of cognitive sciences suggest that the ability to discern hierarchical relationships...

Dr Ivan Rajković (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) Balkanizing Sahlins: national humiliation and stranger capitalism in a semi-periphery Focusing on a Serbian car plant that has been privatized by FIAT, this talk examines Balkan humiliations through Oceanic eyes, and vice versa. When they recall how the...

Dr Joe Ellis (University of Cambridge) The Structure of Freedom: Cosmology, Exemplarity and the Subject in Mongolia This paper will argue that the ontological turn and the anthropology of ethics, while initially appearing as radically opposed paradigms, are remarkably similar in their diagnosis of wide swaths of...

Dr Matei Candea (University of Cambridge) Back to the drawing board: diagrams, comparison and anthropological form This paper focuses on questions of form and formalism in anthropological knowledge production, through a very specific example: that of the various ways in which diagrams and writing have been articulated in...

Dr Lotte Hoek (University of Edinburgh) Animating the Image: Film Appreciation and the Labour of Cinephilia in Bangladesh Set within cinephile circles in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this paper explores the image work that accompanies modes of film appreciation. Driven by a desire to think cinephilia anthropologically, I focus on...

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...