Seminar Programmes
Friday Seminar (Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory)
Our regular Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory takes place in OLD 6.05 (Seligman Library) from 10:30am - 12:30pm on Fridays during term time.
Date: 31 May 2013
Speaker: James Johnston (LSE)
Title: Unhappy families are all alike: Looking for continuity in the ethical dilemmas of Chinese families.
Visit the Seminar Series| page for more information.
Interdisciplinary Seminar on Human Cooperation
Summer Term
Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics
Venue: Seligman Library, Room OLD6.05, Old Building, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE
Wednesday May 22nd at 4:00pm
Christian List (Departments of Government and Philosophy, LSE)
Three kinds of collective attitude
Wednesday June 5th at 4:00pm
Rita Astuti & Charles Stafford (Department of Anthropology, LSE)
Mutualistic cooperation across cultures
Wednesday June 19th at 4:00pm
Fabrice Clément (Cognitive Science Center, University of Neuchatel)
Cooperation and trust: a developmental perspective
Wednesday July 3rd at 4:00pm
Francesco Guala (Department of Economics, University of Milan)
The three keys of cooperation: rules, expectations, and (cheap) punishment
For additional information please contact Charles Stafford: c.stafford@lse.ac.uk|
Forum on Religion Events
The Forum on Religion, originally based in the LSE's European Institute, has become part of the new Programme for the Study of Religion and Non-Religion. The Forum hosts the Programme's public lectures and an interdisciplinary seminar series, which are free and open to all.
Visit the Programme for Religion and Non-Religion| to find out about Forum on Religion events|.
Public Lecture
Of Miracles, Events, and Special Effects
Speaker: Hent de Vries (The Johns Hopkins University) 
Chair: Matthew Engelke (LSE)
What might be said to characterise genuine events, in history and politics? In what sense might miracles (or, more precisely, the theologies and traditions of belief in miracles—and their modern critique) offer the greatest resource for answering this question, even in the age of global markets and media? In this lecture, Hent de Vries addresses the significance of events within and for global religions, paying particular attention to the ways in which we can understand their 'special effects' by turning to miracles as a conceptual resource.
Date: 13 June 2013
Time: 18.30-20.00
Venue: Seligman Library, 6th Floor, Old Building, LSE, WC2A 2AE
Hent de Vries, one of the foremost philosophers of religion working today, is Director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University and Russ Family Professor in the Department of Philosophy. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, and Religion and Media (co-edited with Samuel Weber).
This event is free and open to all. For further information please contact Dr Matthew Engelke, m.engelke@lse.ac.uk|
Film Screening
"Nong Jia Le - Peasant Family Happiness"
Venue: Thai Theatre, NAB LG.03, LSE
Date: Tuesday, June 4th, 4.00-6.00pm
The film is followed by a Q&A session with filmmaker Jenny Chio
"Nong Jia Le - Peasant Family Happiness" depicts the everyday experience of 'doing tourism' in two rural, ethnic tourism destinations in Guizhou and Guangxi provinces, China. 
Focusing on the perspectives of village residents, this film portrays how modern, rural Chinese negotiate between the day-to-day consequences of tourist arrivals in their home villages and ideal projections of who they are and what their lives can achieve through tourism development.
Jenny Chio is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University. Her scholarly research focuses on rural social change in China, ethnic identity, tourism and migration, and documentary studies. She is also an ethnographic filmmaker and is working in various collaborative documentary film projects.
This is a joint event organised by the LSE's Department of International Development| and the Department of Anthropology|.
Selected Recent Public Events
2013 Malinowski Memorial Lecture
Date: Thursday 16 May 2013
Time: 6.00pm - 7.00pm
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building, LSE
The centrality of emotion in thought and action is increasingly recognised in the human sciences, though basic questions of definition and scope remain unresolved. Where do emotions begin and end? How should we identify and analyse them? How write about them? Ethnographic fieldwork, as pioneered by Malinowski, offers powerful insights into the place of emotion in social life; but emotions are peculiarly difficult to capture in the generalizing format of case study and ethnographic summary. Andrew Beatty argues that semantic, structural, and discourse-based approaches tend to miss what is most important - what counts for the persons concerned and therefore what makes the emotion. Beatty reviews the conceptual and methodological issues and concludes that only a narrative approach can capture both the particularity and the temporal dimension of emotion, restoring verisimilitude and fidelity to experience.
Andrew Beatty is author of A Shadow Falls: in the heart of Java and a forthcoming ethnographic narrative After the Ancestors.
The LSE Public Events Malinowski Memorial Lecture web page| has additional details about this event.
The Anthropology and Emotion podcast| of this event is now available to download.
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A talk by Mr Prashant Bhushan
Chair: Dr Mukulika Banerjee
Date: 15 March 2013
Venue: CLM 2.02
Time: 6.00pm
Prashant Bhushan is a practicing advocate in the Supreme Court of India. He has a distinguished record as a social activist. He was instrumental in the anti-corruption movement in India in August 2011 that mobilised an unprecedented response from India’s youth and urban populations. The movement demanded anti-corruption legislative measures in the form of the establishment of a Lokpal – an ombudsman, to check the mammoth-scale political corruption that has been coming to light in India. Last year, together with his fellow social activist and anti corruption campaigner Arvind Kejriwal, Bhushan founded the Aam Admi (the Common Man’s) Party. Prashant Bhushan will talk about the new party and its agenda to fight against corruption in the political establishment and falling standards in public life.
All welcome; there will be plenty of opportunity for debate and discussion.
LSE Department of Anthropology
Literary Festival event
Narratives: the oral tradition of storytelling and fiction
Speakers: Dr Vayu Naidu, Michael Wood
Chair: Dr Mukulika Banerjee
Date: Saturday 2 March, 11am-12.30pm
After a performance by the highly-acclaimed story teller Vayu Naidu of a story from the Ramayana, this discussion will explore the oral tradition of storytelling, and fiction.
Vayu Naidu is a story teller. She is founder and artistic director of the Vau Naidu company, which promotes storytelling as theatre, with a signature style combining text, music and dance. She has brought research and performance of oral traditions into British Academy, creating new works with composers and orchestras and for theatre and radio drama. Her debut novel is Sita's Ascent.
Michael Wood is a British historian and filmmaker . He has made over 100 documentary films including In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great and The Story of India, which have been seen in most countries of the world; the latest was The Great British Story on BBC 2 this summer. Among his many books he is the author of The Story of India (BBC) and a contributor to Chidambaram the Home of Nataraja (Marg Mumbai); his South Indian Journey (Penguin) was praised by Rough Guides as ‘one of the most enlightening books ever written about South India’. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a governor of the RSC.
This event forms part of LSE's 5th Literary Festival, taking place from 26 February - 2 March 2013, with a series of events, free to attend and open to all, featuring a stellar line-up of speakers. Tickets online from Monday 4 February at http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/spaceForThought/LiteraryFestival2013/Home.aspx|
Association for Cypriot, Greek and Turkish Affairs
The Peter Loizos Memorial Lecture
Being Between: Thinking with Peter Loizos’ Legacy
Speaker: Dr Rebecca Bryant, A. N. Hadjiyannis Senior Research Fellow, European Institute, LSE
Chair: Dr Jonathan Parry, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, LSE
Date: Friday 8 March 2013, 6.30pm
Venue: Lecture Room 1, Ground floor, Tower 1, LSE
This lecture takes as its subject the problem of anthropological knowledge and its representation during conflict. Moving between reflections on Loizos’s work and the author’s own fieldwork in Cyprus, the lecture explores the ‘between-ness’ that constitutes the ethnographic endeavour. Unlike other social science disciplines, the methods of anthropology bring one close to one’s interlocutors, making one both inside and outside the group, a situation that is especially complicated by conflict : the duty to let one’s informants speak, and the responsibility to speak in ways that may undermine their testimony. The lecture discusses how we can understand the type of knowledge that arises from such situations, as well the problems of its representation for the discipline.
Public lecture
Reflections on Freedom of Religion in Europe and Beyond
Speaker: Professor Heiner Bielefeldt (UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief and Professor of Human Rights and Human Rights Politics, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Chair: Dr Ronan McCrea (Faculty of Laws, University College London)
Date: 25 April 2013
Time: 18.30-20.00
Venue: Wolfson Lecture Theatre, New Academic Building, London School of Economics
Within the UK, the recent cases of Nadia Ewedia and others before the European Court of Human Rights have brought questions of freedom of religion or belief to the fore, cases which are part of a much broader set of currents, interests, and debates. In this lecture, Professor Bielefeldt will reflect upon how what we’re seeing in the UK relates to these broader currents, from his unique perspective as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief.
This event is free and open to all with no ticket required. The New Academic Building is accessible at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Please contact Dr Matthew Engelke via religionforum@lse.ac.uk| with any questions.
Co-sponsored by the LSE’s Forum on Religion| and Centre for the Study of Human Rights|.
With Good Reason? A Debate on the Foundations of Ethics
Speakers: Dr Julian Baggini, Canon Dr Angus Ritchie, and Dr Mark Vernon
Date and Time: 6 December 2012, 18.30-20.00
Venue: Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House, LSE
This event is co-sponsored with Theos|.
Religious and secular philosophers have long debated whether ethics have an objective basis (moral realism) or a relative basis (moral relativism). But in terms of the first, does theism or atheism offer a better basis for ‘moral realism’? In this debate, a theist, an atheist and an agnostic debate this question in what promises to be a lively and (perhaps) spirited exchange.
Public lecture at LSE: 'Ethics as Piety'
Date and Time: 27 June 2012, 18.00-19.30
Venue: New Academic Building LG.09 (off Lincoln's Inn Fields), London School of Economics
Speaker: Webb Keane (University of Michigan)
Chair: Charles Stafford (London School of Economics)
Sponsored by the Anthropology Department| and the Programme for the Study of Religion and Non-Religion|
Assuming that what we call “religion” and “ethics” are in principle distinct from each other, what is the conceptual relationship between them? What are the historical pathways along which the two often seem to converge? What are the social implications of that convergence where it occurs? And when they converge, what remainder escapes the conflation of these two? These are, of course, very large questions, whose investigation requires substantial empirical and conceptual work. In the interests of carrying out a preliminary ground-clearing, this talk is confined to reflections on a limited number of texts. Discussion of these texts will center on how certain traditions within Islam and Protestant Christianity objectify ethics in ways that render them cognitively explicit and thus expose them to pressures toward rationalization, generalization, and abstraction. But these traditions also expect ethics to guide everyday life, in all its concrete particularity, with potentially paradoxical consequences.
The event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis.
See http://www2.lse.ac.uk/anthropology/research/PRNR/Events/events.aspx| for more details
Other Past Events
Special Seminar
Marcel Mauss Today
Marcos Lanna, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brasil
Date: 26 July 2012, 15.30-17.30
Venue: Connaught House CON 7.03, London School of Economics
In this seminar, Professor Lanna will demonstrate that the main objective of Mauss´s Essai sur le don is to present redistribution of material and immaterial signs and some type of alienability in communication as universal features of social organization. Taking departure from Mauss´s thesis, it will also be argued that there are historic as well as logic continuities between the figures of "gift" and "commodity".
This seminar is open to staff and students in the department of Anthropology. Others may attend by invitation.
Public Event: Killing the Father in Germany
Stephan Feuchtwang, Felix Römer and Hans Steinmüller in conversation with John Borneman
Chair: Peter Skrandies
In 1967, psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich famously analysed postwar Germany as a 'fatherless society' that was unable to mourn. John Borneman, a Princeton anthropologist, discusses what has happened to this thesis, and the different forms in which the German people have 'killed their fathers' in the postwar period, both at home and in national politics.
A joint event of the LSE Language Centre and the Department of Anthropology.
The event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis.
John Borneman is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He has conducted fieldwork in Germany, Central Europe, Lebanon, and Syria, and completed projects on the symbolic forms of political identification, the relation of the state to everyday life, kinship and sexuality, and forms of justice and accountability. His publications include Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation (1992); Death of the Father: Toward an Anthropology of the End in Political Authority (2003); Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo (2008); Political Crime and the Memory of Loss (2011). Currently he is working on a project on the therapeutic and legal treatment of incest and the sexual abuse of children in Berlin, Germany.
Stephan Feuchtwang is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Anthropology, LSE.
Felix Römer is Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute, London.
Hans Steinmüller is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at LSE.
Peter Skrandies is German language coordinator at the LSE Language centre.
Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India
Professor Akhil Gupta
Date: Monday 11th June, 2012, 6.30-8.00pm
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building, LSE
This event was co-hosted with the Department of Geography and Environment|.
Sixty years after liberation from colonial rule, why has the Indian state been unable to eradicate extreme poverty? Although poverty rates have been falling sharply in the last twenty five years, almost a quarter of the Indian population still lives in conditions that can only be described as inhumane. How does one conceptualize the violence of poverty? I attempt to understand the mechanisms that help normalize such violence through the category of biopolitics. Engaging Foucault and Agamben, I argue that the very mechanisms of care that are used by the Indian state to look after the poor systematically produce arbitrary outcomes, whose consequences are catastrophic for those who do not receive the care. The reason for such arbitrariness often lies in the routines by which state bureaucracies function. An ethnography of bureaucracies, therefore, gives us insights into how structural violence is reproduced.
Akhil Gupta is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for India and South Asia (CISA) at UCLA. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Western Michigan University, his Master's in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, and his Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University. He has taught at the University of Washington, Seattle (1987-89), and at Stanford University (1989-2006) before coming to UCLA.
This event has been made possible with the generous support of the Annual Fund.
Malinowski Memorial Lecture 2012
Dr Alpa Shah'The Muck of the Past': Revolution, Social Transformation and the Maoists in India
Date: Thursday 17 May 2012, 6.00-7.00pm
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building, LSE
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Alpa Shah teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of 'In the Shadows of the State: Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India' and co-editor of 'Windows into a Revolution: Ethnographies of Maoism in India and Nepal.'
Full details about the event and venue can be found here|.
God's Money Makers: Volatile Markets and the Problem of Planning a Life
Caitlin Zaloom
Date: Friday 16 March 2012, 6:00-8:00pm
Venue: NAB 1.04, New Academic Building
Caitlin Zaloom is Associate Professor at NY University. Her areas of research/interest are: culture and economy; cities and globalization; financial markets; technology and cities; science and technology studies; social theory.
Podcast| of Caitlin Zaloom's lecture.
For further information please follow this link |.