Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings

London School of Economics and Political Science

Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/anthropology

Departmental Report

Staff

We are very saddened to report the death of Professor Olivia Harris in April 2009. She had been suffering from cancer. Olivia made a unique personal and anthropological contribution to our Department and will be very deeply missed.

Professor Chris Fuller will be retiring in September 2009 from the Department after many years at the LSE. Professor Deborah James is due to take over as Head of Department in 2009/10.

Professor Jonathan Parry  has been awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship to be held for 22 months from 1st September 2009 to complete a project on Industry and inequality in central India.

Rita Astuti was awarded a personal Chair in Anthropology. We are also pleased to announce that Dr. Mukulika Bannerjee and Dr. Heonik Kwon will be joining the Department, as Readers, in late 2009. Dr. Matthew Engelke has been promoted to the post of Senior Lecturer.

Mette High has been awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship for three years from September 2009 until September 2012.

Dr Diana Marre (University of Barcelona) has Visiting Fellow status with funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation; Dr Janaki Abraham and Dr Pushpesh Kumar have Visiting Fellow status with British Academy Awards.

Research

Deborah James has been at the head of a major ESRC award study 'Investing, engaging in enterprise, gambling and getting into debt: popular economies and citizen expectations in South Africa'  to study popular economies in South Africa. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/anthropology/popular_economies.htm

Laura Bear has been at the head of a two-year ESRC research grant to study neoliberal transformations of Kolkatas Hooghly River, and also an ESRC Research Seminars grant with Stephan Feuchtwang on the theme 'Conflicts in Time: Rethinking 'Contemporary' Globalisation', to develop work on different and conflicting temporalities in various settings.

Henrike Donner has received a grant of 18,000 from the LSE Seed Fund to develop the project 'Ethnography and Activism' together with Sharad Chari (LSE, Geography), including funding for an international conference on 'Ethnography and Activism', funding to travel to India and South Africa to initiate future collaboration, and funding to develop a website for the project. Fenella Cannell has received a grant for a major SAR conference coming up in April 2009 in Santa Fe.

Alongside the weekly Friday Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, the Department has hosted regular seminars on Culture and Cognition, Africa, East and Inner Asia, South Asia, Taiwan in Comparative Perspective, and hosted the joint LSE/UCL Latin America Workshop during Lent Term 2009.

The Department has also hosted the following special workshops and events:

Dreams of Rivers and Seas, panel debate as part of the LSE's first Literary Weekend, March 2009

2009 Conflicts in Time Seminar Series, ongoing

Anthropology Fieldwork Photography Exhibition, April 2009

Ordinary Ethics in China Today, conference, May 2009

The Individualization of Chinese Society, Lecture by Yunxiang Yan, May 2009

2009 Malinowski Memorial Lecture, given this year by Dr. Joshua Barker, May 2009

Ethnography and Activism Workshop, May 2009

Popular Economies in South Africa, May 2009

Migration Studies Workshop, June 2009

Anthropology in London: Current Research (III), jointly with Brunel, Goldsmiths, SOAS, UCL and UEL, June 2009

Globalisation in/and Mofussil India, July 2009

Postgraduate Training

The Department currently has 66 MPhil/PhD students.

We have continued with attempts to ensure that PhD students and researchers from the different London Departments get together and share research. In addition to cross-college initiatives and seminars, we organised the third one-day workshop embracing the whole of London anthropology in June 2009, involving the anthropology departments at Brunel, Goldsmiths, LSE, SOAS, UCL, and UEL. We very much appreciate UCL's generosity in offering to provide a venue for this event, given that works were taking place on the LSE campus during this time.

Teaching

The Department has renewed its PhD exchange scheme with Columbia University under the new GPPN; details can be found at http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/anthropology/columbia_exchange.htm. This agreement is due to start this year and run for five years.

We have introduced the following new courses to be introduced in the 2009/10 academic year:

Medical Anthropology

Children and Youth

Borders and Boundaries.

Department Staff List

Academic Staff

Dr Catherine Allerton
Eastern Indonesia; place and landscape, houses, kinship and marriage, childhood and schooling.

Dr Rita Astuti
Madagascar; kinship, gender, anthropology of death, cognitive development and cultural transmission; ethnographic and experimental research methods.

Dr Laura Bear
South Asia: anthropology of the state, temporality, neo-liberalism, globalisation, labour.

Dr Fenella Cannell
Lowland Philippines, United States; anthropology of Christianity, healing and mediumship, gender, Mormonism and kinship.

Dr Amit Desai
South Asia; anthropology of India and Hinduism, conversion, nationalism, witchcraft and sorcery, friendship.

Dr Henrike Donner
India; gender and kinship, education, reproductive change, middle class lifestyles, urban space and politics.

Dr Matthew Engelke
Zimbabwe; anthropology of Christianity, ritual and texts, history of anthropology, human rights.

Professor Stephan Feuchtwang
China and Taiwan, Germany; Chinese popular religion, the anthropology of history, life stories, family myths and responses to catastrophic loss, comparison of civilisations and empires.

Professor Chris Fuller
[Head of Department 2008-2009; retiring September 2009]
South Asia; India and Hinduism, South Indian temples, religion and politics, globalisation and information technology, Tamil Brahman society and history.

Professor Deborah James [Head of Department 2009-12]
South Africa; political economy, civil society and the state, land reform and property regimes, development and migration, popular economies, ethnicity, ethnomusicology, HIV/AIDS and reproductive health.

Professor Martha Mundy
Arab societies; law, agrarian systems, sociology of Islam, historical anthropology, kinship.

Dr Mathijs Pelkmans
Caucasus (Republic of Georgia), Central Asia (Kyrgyz Republic); anthropology of borders, political anthropology, anthropology of religion.

Dr Michael W. Scott
Melanesia; ontology, comparative cosmology, models of sociality, Christianity, ethnogenesis and postcolonial transformations of the nation-state, space and place.

Professor Charles Stafford
China and Taiwan; learning, schooling and child development, cognitive anthropology, the relationship between learning and economic life.

Research and LSE Fellows

Dr Mette High [LSE Fellow]
Mongolia; economic transformations, illegality, gendered hierarchies, cosmology and landscape.

Dr Annu Jalais [Research Fellow]
India, West Bengal; the environment, gender, the anthropology of animals.

Dr Fraser G. McNeill [Research Fellow]
South Africa; HIV/AIDS, music, poisonings, traditional leadership and female initiation, knowledge and experience.

Dr Haripriya Narasimhan [Research Fellow]
India; medical pluralism, globalisation, nationalism.

Dr Goncalo D. Santos [LSE Fellow]
China (South China in particular); kinship and sociality, childhood, fertility and modernity; farming, technology and environment; mind and cognition; history of anthropology.

Dr Harry Walker [LSE Fellow, leaving August 2009]
Lowland South America; sociality and relatedness, materiality, ritual language, symbolic ecology.

Dr Ilana van Wyk [Research Fellow]South Africa; religion, pentecostalism, witchcraft, money.

Administrative Staff

Yanina Hinrichsen
Departmental Manager

Camilla Griffiths
Administrator

Joanna Stone
Administration and Communications Officer

Visiting Staff

Véronique Bénéï [Visiting Senior Fellow]
Education, gender, nationalism, political anthropology, epistemology of the social sciences, citizenship, multiculturalism, anthropology of the body and of emotions, south Asia, Latin America, history, memory and slavery, violence and its aftermath.

Dr Laurent Berger [Visiting Fellow]
Madagascar, Mali; Politics and Religion, Kinship, Cognition, Globalisation, Sacred Kingship, Possession Cults, Initiatory Societies, History of Anthropology

Dr Vania Bustamante [Visiting Fellow]
Latin America; Brazil and Peru; Anthropology of child care, kinship, personhood, gender; Public Health, psychoanalysis

Dr Xiangqun Chang [Visiting Fellow]
Contemporary China studies; personal, institutional & social relationships, reciprocity & social networks, social creativity, social support, fieldwork methodology

Dr Geoffrey Gowlland [Visiting Fellow]
China; learning and skill acquisition, art and material culture.

Dr Diana Marre [Visiting Fellow]
Gender, transnational adoption and assisted reproduction, kinship, anthropology of childhood, economic anthropology, globalization, postcolonialism, Spain and Latin America

Dr Lucia Michelutti [Visiting Fellow]
India, Venezuela; caste and race, religion, popular politics and socialism, historical anthropology and comparative colonialism.

Professor Dan Sperber [Centennial Professor]
Retired Academic Staff

Professor Maurice Bloch
Madagascar; religion and politics, cognitive anthropology, kinship.

Professor Jean La Fontaine
East Africa, United Kingdom; kinship (children), incest, ritual, witchcraft and Satanism.

Professor Ioan Lewis
Somalia and the Horn of Africa; shamanism, Islam and traditional societies, witchcraft and cannibalism.

Professor Peter Loﺯs
Cyprus; Greco-Turkish relations, refugee adaptation/health, ethnographic film.

Professor Jonathan Parry
South Asia; sociology of Hinduism, caste and other forms of inequality, industrialisation, labour and the anthropology of work.

Dr James Woodburn
Sub-Saharan Africa; hunting and gathering societies, egalitarian political systems.