Senior Seminar

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...

Dr Kimberly Chong (University College London) Balance Sheet Aesthetics and the Racial Contours of Cost In this paper I analyse a seemingly disparate set of practices – how fund managers in the UK decide what stocks to invest in, and the management of back-office “knowledge factories” in China. You could say that these...

Dr Mythri Jegathesan (Santa Clara University) Plots beyond Malaiyakam : in search of land and livelihood in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province This talk examines how Northern Malaiyaka (“Hill Country”) Tamils build home and pursue livelihood in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province after the country’s civil war. Using evidence from...

Professor Graham Jones (MIT) Evidential Sociabilities: The Poetics of Secondhand Knowledge in US and Chinese Social Media The ability to cooperate in gathering, interpreting, and disseminating information is key to the survival of our species. Language makes it possible to share knowledge with people removed in both time...

Dr Soumhya Venkatesan (University of Manchester) Invocations of freedom and the creation of right-wing publics in England Isaiah Berlin remarks that ‘almost every moralist in history has praised freedom. Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term is so porous that there is little...

Dr Maurizio Esposito La Rossa (LSE) Complicate jokes: political rivalries, royal diarchies and joking relationships among the Sakalava of Madagascar If political rivalries have interests that motivate them, and strategies through which they unfold, they also have a particular form through which they express themselves...

Dr Maya Mayblin (University of Edinburgh) Shadow Partners and Virile Celibacy: priests, sex, and secular politics in Brazil In this talk, I explore the stories of a group of Catholic priests who enter the world of municipal government, and examine how queer, celibate, and heteronormative concepts of gender and sexuality...

Dr Rosie Jones McVey (University of Cambridge) Learning From The Herd?: Ethics and Intercorporeality in Equine-Assisted Therapy Horses are being harnessed for a new sort of work, as therapists’ assistants. Within equine-assisted therapy programs, the nature of horses – as herd and prey animals - is thought to make them...