Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings
University of Oxford
Departemental report
The School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME), comprises the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA), the Institute of Human Sciences (IHS), the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology (ICEA), the Centre for Migration Policy and Society (COMPAS) funded by the ESRC, and the teaching and research functions of the Pitt Rivers Museum. Research clusters include the Centre for Anthropology and Mind, medical and ecological anthropology, the longstanding British Centre for Durkheimian Studies that continues to organize a range of workshops, book launches, and other events, and the Pitt Rivers Museum Research Centre which enhances the co-ordination of material and visual anthropology, and museum ethnography. The School embraces a holistic approach to the discipline encompassing social, material, visual, medical, biological, cognitive, and evolutionary anthropology.
Staff
Tragedy struck on 9th June 2009 when Nicola Knight died of a heart attack at the age of 33. He was a key person in the Centre for Anthropology and Mind and in teaching and research on methods across the School and will be sorely missed.
Michael Keith joined the department in November 2008 as the new director of COMPAS and has begun a series of initiatives to safeguard the future of the research centre, beyond the dedicated ESRC funding. These include a re-designed Master’s degree in Migration Studies in association with the Oxford Department for International Development (ODID, formerly QEH).
David Gellner took up the All Souls professorship and will take over as Head of Department in October 2009 (Marcus Banks will become Director of ISCA). Unfortunately, due to budgetary constraints, it was not possible to fill the position he vacated, the historic University Lectureship in the Anthropology of South Asia formerly held by M.N. Srinivas, Louis Dumont, David Pocock, Ravi Jain, and Nick Allen. Iain Walker joined the department as maternity cover for Mette Berg, and was able to obtain a two-year ESRC mid-career fellowship to continue his association with the department from October 2009.
Katharine Charsley left the department to join the Department of Sociology in Bristol. Hélène Neveu-Kringelbach took up a joint departmental lectureship with African Studies. Susanne Schultz started as Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow and Chiara Letizia as Newton Fellow. Vanessa Grotti took up her post as a British Academy post-doctoral fellow.
Research
Dr Xiang Biao won the 2008 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology for his book Global "Body Shopping": An Indian International Labor System in the Information Technology Industry (Princeton University Press, 2007) and David Pratten's book, The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria, won the Royal Anthropological Institute's Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology 2007. Amy McLennan, one of our MPhil students in Medical Anthropology, was awarded the Hocart Essay Prize 2008 jointly with another candidate for her essay, ‘What the Nose Knows: The Role of Odour in Ritually-induced Bodily Transformation and Implications for Obesity Research in the Pacific Islands’.
The Marett Lecturer this year was Professor Scott Atran. Dr Judith Scheele gave the 2009 Evans-Pritchard Lectures and will shortly be joining All Souls as a postdoctoral Fellow, the first in social anthropology. JASO (the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford) was relaunched as an online journal and is available, together with all back issues, at http://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/publications/jaso.
Teaching
Members of SAME contribute to undergraduate teaching in anthropology on two degrees, Human Sciences and Archaeology and Anthropology. For details see:
http://www.ihs.ox.ac.uk/current-students
and
ttp://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/undergraduate-studies.html
We offer taught Master’s in Social Anthropology (9-month MSt, 12-month MSc, 2-year MPhil), Material Culture and Museum Ethnography (MSc and MPhil), Visual Anthropology (MSc), Medical Anthropology (MSc and MPhil), Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology (MSc), and Migration Studies (MPhil). 82 students were accepted on to these degrees in 2008. Further details are available at:
www.isca.ox.ac.uk/prospective-students/degrees/
There are currently 63 students registered for doctorates in the department.
An extraordinarily high proportion of the department received teaching awards for 2007-08 from the university (Inge Daniels, Romola Davenport, Paul Dresch, Elizabeth Ewart, Hélène Neveu-Kringelbach, and Laura Peers); furthermore, unlike recipients in some other departments, all the above were nominated by their students. In 2008-09 a posthumous award was made to Dr Nicola Knight in recognition of his outstanding commitment to teaching. As a result of colleague nominations, Dr David Pratten received a category A award, for outstanding teaching and commitment to teaching. He was also awarded a Category B award, for achievement in teaching development work and/or innovations in teaching practice.
Full-time teaching staff
Marcus Banks (PhD 1985, Cambridge; Professor) Jainism, ethnicity and race, ethnographic film and visual representation; India, UK
Robert Barnes (DPhil 1973, Oxford; Professor) Thought, kinship, economic exchange, history; Indonesia
Mette Berg (DPhil 2004, Oxford; Lecturer) Migration, transnationalism, diasporas, the Caribbean, Cuba, cosmopolitanism, gender
Xiang Biao (DPhil 2003, Oxford; RCUK Fellow) Migration, governance, labour, India-China comparison
Udi Butler (PhD 2004, Goldsmiths; Lecturer) Visual anthropology and ethnographic film, personhood and emotions, anthropology of development, anthropology of childhood and youth, activism and new social movements, participative research
Katharine Charsley (PhD 2003, Edinburgh; Lecturer) Migration, South Asia and South Asian diasporas, British Pakistanis, transnational marriage, kinship, gender
Inge Daniels (PhD 2001, London; Lecturer) Visual and material culture, consumption, gift exchange, religion
Romola Davenport (PhD 1998, Cambridge; Lecturer) Historical demography, cause-specific mortality
Paul Dresch (DPhil 1982, Oxford; Lecturer) History, politics, tribalism, Islamic and customary law, semantic anthropology; Middle East (South Arabia)
Robin Dunbar (PhD 1974, Bristol; Professor) Evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology, evolution of sociality, brain evolution in primates, human and primate behavioural ecology
Elizabeth Ewart (PhD 2000, Manchester; Lecturer) Anthropology of Lowland South America, Brazil, indigenous peoples, Amerindian cosmology, material anthropology, body arts, the social significance of everyday practices
David Gellner (DPhil 1987, Oxford; Lecturer) Buddhism, Hinduism, traditional urbanism, healers and their relation to religion, ritual and symbolism; Asia, East Asia
Clare Harris (PhD 1998, London; Lecturer/Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum) Visual and material culture, art and aesthetics, museum and cultural representation, identity and diasporas; Himalayas, Tibet, South Asia
Sondra Hausner (PhD 2002; Lecturer) Religion and religious experience, migration, pilgrimage, space, time, embodiment, and gender and sexuality
Elisabeth Hsu (PhD 1992, Cambridge; Lecturer) Chinese medicine in the PR of China and the diaspora especially East Africa, medical anthropology and linguistics; PRC, Tanzania
Mike O’Hanlon (PhD 1985, London; Lecturer/Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum) Visual anthropology, objectification and modernity, museology; New Guinea, Melanesia, Australia
David Parkin (PhD 1965, London; Professor) Medical anthropology, Islam, cross-cultural rhetorics, epistemological comparativism; East Africa and Indian Ocean, Swahili-speaking coastlands
Robert Parkin (DPhil 1983, Oxford; Lecturer) Kinship, religion, identity, history of anthropology; South Asia, Poland and Eastern Europe
Laura Peers (PhD 1996, McMaster; Lecturer/Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum) Native American cultural history and material culture, representation of Native American cultures, museums and indigenous peoples
David Pratten (PhD 2000, London; Lecturer/African Studies) Historical ethnography and colonialism, youth, violence and vigilantism; West Africa, Nigeria
Stanley Ulijaszek (PhD 1987, London; Professor), Nutritional anthropology, human ecology, reproduction; Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, Poland
Harvey Whitehouse (PhD 1991, Cambridge; Professor) Cultural transmission, cognitive science of culture, religion and ritual; Papua New Guinea and the Pacific
Head of Department: Harvey Whitehouse
Department Secretary: Barbara de Bruine
Other Anthropologists in Oxford
Dr Nick Allen (Emeritus Fellow ISCA/Wolfson – retired)
Dr Shirley Ardener OBE (Research Associate - Queen Elizabeth House)
Dr Walter Armbrust (St Antony’s)
Dr Ruth Barnes (Ashmolean Museum)
Dr Juliet Bedford (Postdoctoral Associate – ISCA)
Dr Jo Boyden (Queen Elizabeth House)
Dr Dawn Chatty (Queen Elizabeth House)
Dr Emma Cohen (Postdoctoral researcher - ICEA)
Jeremy Coote (Pitt Rivers Museum)
Dr John Davis (All Souls)
Dr Janette Davies (Research Associate – Queen Elizabeth House)
Dr Anne de Sales (Research Associate - Maison Française)
Dr Barbara Gerke (Postdoctoral Associate – ISCA)
Professor Roger Goodman (Nissan Institute)
Dr Renee Hirschon (Research Associate – St Peter’s College)
Professor Wendy James (Emeritus Fellow – ISCA/ St Cross College – retired)
Dr Vibha Joshi (Research Fellow)
Dr Nicola Knight (Postdoctoral researcher - ICEA)
Dr Chris Low (African Studies Centre)
Dr Helene Neveu Kringelbach (JRF St Anne’s)
Dr Nicolette Makovicky (Research Fellow – Wolfson College)
Dr David Mills (Centre for Continuing Education)
Professor Judith Okely (Research Associate – Queen Elizabeth House)
Professor Stephen Oppenheimer (Research Associate)
Dr W S F Pickering (British Centre for Durkheimian Studies - retired)
Dr Frank Pieke (Institute for Chinese Studies)
Dr Julia Powles (Research Associate – St Catherine’s College)
Dr Istvan Praet (ESRC Fellow)
Dr Charles Ramble (Lecturer in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at the Oriental Institute)
Dr Josephine Reynell (Research Associate - Queen Elizabeth House)
Professor Vernon Reynolds (Emeritus Fellow - IBA/Magdalen – retired)
Dr Laura Rival (Research Associate – Queen Elizabeth House)
Professor Peter Rivière (Emeritus Fellow - ISCA/Linacre – retired)
Dr Mandy Sadan (PRM, JRF Wolfson)
Dr Alison Shaw (Research Fellow in ETHOX Centre)
Dr Judith Scheele (JRF, Magdalen College)
Dr Lidia Sciama (Research Associate – Queen Elizabeth House)
Dr Devi Sridhar (Research Associate – All Souls College)
Dr Clarinda Still (Research Associate – St Antony’s College)
Dr Martin Stokes (Research Associate – Faculty of Music)
Dr Mohammad Talib (Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies)
Professor Elizabeth Tonkin (Research Associate)
Dr Soraya Tremayne (Research Associate - Fertility and Reproductive Studies Group)
Dr David Turton (African Studies Centre)
Dr Jacqueline Waldren (Research Associate – Queen Elizabeth House)
Dr Eileen Walsh (University of Oxford China Centre)
Special resources and facilities:
Pitt Rivers Museum, Bodleian Library, Tylor Library, Balfour Library, graduate computing facilities in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, visual anthropology workroom
Departmental series
Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO)
