Senior Seminar

Professor John R. Bowen, (Washington University in St Louis) Material Semiotics of Halal Qualities If for hundreds of years Muslims prepared their own foods and ate them, prefaced with a blessing, over the past 20 years or so there have arisen formalized procedures to determine whether or not a product is halal (“...

Professor Robert Hefner, (Boston University) Shariah Ethics: The Place and Challenge of Islamic Legal Traditions in the Anthropology of Morality The great scholar of Islamic legal studies, Wael B. Hallaq, has described Islamic shari’a as the “supreme moral and legal force regulating both society and government” in Muslim-...

Dr Andrew Sanchez, (University of Cambridge) Creation and Transformation: Value and the Satisfaction of Work For the employees of an Indian scrap-metal yard, work is a process of disassembling things that other people no longer want. Despite the difficult conditions of the labour and the social stigma attached to it...

Dr Patrick McKearney, (Max-Cam Research Centre, University of Cambridge) Disabling Violence: Sacrifice and Responsibility in a Christian Care Home for the Cognitively Impaired This paper explores the effect that different models of sacrifice have on the way that people give and take responsibility for physical aggression...

Dr Thomas White, (University of Cambridge) A Multispecies Ethnography of the State: livestock and the politics of affect in a Chinese border region This paper examines the role of animals in the politics of western Inner Mongolia, where pastoralism has been under threat from grassland conservation policies. Recent...

Professor Emma Tarlo, (Goldsmiths, University of London) Tangled Tales and Racial Fictions: The awkwardness of human hair in global circulation Hair is something intimate and familiar. Growing spontaneously from our heads, demanding attention throughout our lives, it is intrinsically bound up with personal and social...