LSE's Anthropology Department, with a long and distinguished history, remains a leading centre for innovative research and teaching. We are committed to both maintaining and renewing the core of the discipline, and our training of PhD students is recognized as outstanding.

Follow this link to see a short film about the Department and some of its students.|

The Anthropology Department is presenting three panels at the LSE Literary Festival next month:

Modernity's Contents and Discontents in India and Pakistan|

Relating the Divided City in South Africa|

Dr Seligman and the Islanders: considering Charles Seligman and his work|

Andrew Sanchez writes on the challenges facing ethnographic researchers of crime and corruption in the Winter 2011 issue of LSE Connect| and on the 2011 London riots in city-analysis.net| (see the second article on this link).

Marshall Sahlins awarded honorary doctorate|

The degree, the highest academic honour the LSE can bestow, was awarded at the graduation ceremony held on Wednesday 14th December 2011. For a transcript of the department's oration, click here|. More.....|

Michael W. Scott |published a chapter entitled 'The Makiran Underground Army: Kastom Mysticism and Ontology Politics South-east Solomon Islands' in Made in Oceania: Social Movements, Cultural Heritage and the State in the Pacific

Edited by Edvard Hviding and Knut M. Rio (Wantage, Sean Kingston Publishing)|

Culture Wars: Context, Models and Anthropologists' Accounts
The relationship between anthropologists’ ethnographic investigations and the lived social worlds in which these originate is a fundamental issue for anthropology.The contributors to this volume investigate the relationship between culture, context, and anthropologists’ models and accounts in new ways.

The Individualization of Chinese Society

Chinese society has seen phenomenal change in the last 30 years. Two of the most profound changes have been the rise of the individual in both public and private spheres and the consequent individualization of Chinese society itself.

Conversion after Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union
The large and sudden influx of missionaries into the former Soviet Union after seventy years of militant secularism has been controversial, and the widespread occurrence of conversion has led to anxiety about social and national disintegration.

LSE Anthropology holds many events| throughout the year, ranging from the Malinowski Memorial Lecture (given in 2011 by Dr Tobias Kelly from the University of Edinburgh) to regional seminars, a weekly research seminar, and a host of conferences and workshops.

Upcoming events:

'The Return of the Indian': An Interdisciplinary Seminar on Class and Ethnicity in the Andes
|Monday 27th February 2012

Uncertain Futures: Volatile Markets and the Problem of Planning a Life|
Friday 16th March 2012

Every week during Lent Term 2012 LSE Anthropology will be holding a research seminar on anthropological theory: these are held every Friday, 10:30am - 12:30pm, Seligman Library, OLD6.05.

A list of the forthcoming speakers and their seminar topics for Lent Term 2012 is below.

10 February

Joanna Cook (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Negotiating and narrativising 'not-achieving' in Thai Buddhism

17 February

Tony Crook (University of St Andrews)
Al Gore's Holography of Breath

24 February

Edvard Hviding (University of Bergen)
Rank and Power in Island Melanesia: The Long Run of Chiefly Practice in the Western Solomons.

2 March

Harry Walker (LSE)
The Violence of Justice: Law and Amazonian Cosmopolitics

9 March

Allen Abramson (University College London)
Disjuncture as a Recurrent Element Within Structure: Plotting Continuity Across the Rural/Urban Divide in Fiji

16 March

Ruy Llera Blanes (Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, LSE)
Tokoists have never been modern. Organizing time, memory and expectations in an Angolan prophetic movement

PhD Theses|

Marcello Sorrentino Development in the Mountains of Confusion: Guaribas under the Zero-Hunger Programme

Elizabeth Frantz Exporting subservience: Sri Lankan Women's migration for domestic work

Maxim Bolt Life and labour on the settler farms of the Zimbabwean-South African border

Gillian Mann Being, becoming and unbecoming a refugee: The lives of Congolese children in Dar es Salaam

George St Clair Staying Humble in the City: Traditional Pentecostalism in Contemporary São Paulo

Pradeep Shinde Kunchikorve worlds of work

Marina Sapritsky Negotiating Traditions: Transformations of Jewish Identities and Community Building in Post-Soviet Odessa, Ukraine

Ankur Datta The Politics of Place, Community and Recognition among Kashmiri Pandit Forced Migrants in Jammu and Kashmir

Daniel Washburn Conversion and the Logic of Mormonism: An Ethnography from the Russian City of Samara

Indira Arumugam Kinship as Citizenship: State Formations, Sovereignty and Political Ethics Among the Kallars of Central Tamilnadu

Jordan Mullard Status, Security and Change: An Ethnographic Study of Caste, Class and Religion in Rural Rajasthan

Hui Zhang Windfall Wealth and Envy in Three Chinese Mining Villages

Victoria Boydell The Social Life of the Pill: An Ethnography of Contraceptive Pill Users in a Central London Family Planning Clinic

Judith Bovensiepen The Land of Gold: Risk and Recognition in the Central Highlands of Timor-Leste

Yoshimi Umeda Filipina Intermarriage in Rural Japan: An Anthropological Approach

Katharine Dow A Stable Environment: Surrogacy and the Good Life in Scotland

Carolyn Heitmeyer Identity and Difference in a Muslim Community in Central Gujarat, India Following the 2002 Communal Violence

Andrew Sanchez Workers, Netas and Goondas: The Casualisation of Labour in an Indian Company Town

Elizabeth Hull Status, Morality and the Politics of Transformation: An Ethnographic Account of Nurses in Kwa-Zulu-Natal, South Africa

Nicolas Martin Politics, Patronage and Debt Bondage in the Pakistani Punjab

Tom Widger Self Harm and Self Inflicted Death amongst Sinhalese Buddhits in Sri Lanka: An Ethnographic Study

Rory De Wilde Opium Poppy Husk Traders in Rajasthan: The Lives and Work of Businessmen in the Contemporary Indian Opium Industry

Hans Steinmuller Everyday Moralities: Family, Work, Ritual, and the Local State in Rural China

Student Experience

Research Map

Culture & Cognition