Senior Seminar

'Our values, their culture - a career in squaring the diplomatic circle’ A talk by SocAnth alumnus Gareth Ward, current British Ambassador to Vietnam, sharing experience from 20 years working in Russia and China

Dr Andrea Grant (University of Cambridge) Love Talk : On radio intimacy and the limits of forgiveness in Rwanda This paper considers Love Talk, a popular FM radio programme broadcast from Kigali, Rwanda, that was well-known for its frank discussions of love, relationships, and sexuality. Hosted by two young women, Love...

Dr Anna Strhan (University of York) Evangelicals, Ethics, and the Aporia of Community This paper draws on fieldwork conducted with two evangelical churches in London to explore the different ways in which each imagines and enacts particular forms of difference and belonging in relation to their local areas. Exploring the...

Dr Rachel Spronk (University of Amsterdam) Enacting aspiration We can safely say that the majority of people around the globe aspire to have a good life. How these aspirations come into fruition, or not, is subject to many scholarly work focusing on youth and education, poverty alleviation or, more recently, on the global...

Dr Sukanya Sarbadhikary (Presidency University, Calcutta) Afterlife Everyday: Bengali Sacred Archetypes of Domesticity and the Problem of Interiority This essay brings together decisive sacred archetypes of Bengali homemaking: sounds of the evening shankh (conch), the goddess Lakshmi, and the female snake-deity, Manasa. It...

Dr David Henig (University of Kent) Economic Theologies of Abundance: Halal Exchange and the Limits of Neoliberal Effects in Post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina This paper questions claims about the all-pervasive neoliberalisation of everyday life that dominate many debates in anthropology and beyond. Situated in deprived rural...

Dr Stephen Hugh-Jones (University of Cambridge) Monteverdi's Unruly Women and their Amazonian Sisters: a Philosophy of the Body-Tube In his 'The Jealous Potter', Lévi-Strauss outlines an Amazonian philosophy of the digestive tube allied to the use of the blowgun. Though aimed in the right direction, his sketch misses the...

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-...