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.|

News
Publications
Events
PhDs 2009-12

LSE Anthropology tops Guardian league table

We are delighted to announce that the LSE's Department of Anthropology is top-ranked in the Guardian's University Guide 2013 Anthropology league table.

Peter Loizos

The Department of Anthropology is very sad to announce the death of Emeritus Professor Peter Loizos, on Friday 2nd March. He is remembered with great fondness as an excellent teacher and an extraordinarily supportive colleague and friend.

Please click through for more about Peter|.

Andrew Sanchez and Mukulika Banerjee have written pieces in the new LSE Ideas Special Report: 'India: The Next Superpower?', which was published on 6 March 2012. Andrew's section is entitled 'Corruption in India' and Mukulika's is entitled 'Democracy'.

Michael W. Scott published an article entitled 'The Matter of Makira: Colonialism, Competition, and the Production of Gendered Peoples in Contemporary Solomon Islands and Medieval Britain' in History and Anthropology, 2012, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 115-148.

Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India
Professor Akhil Gupta (UCLA)|
Date: Monday 11th June 2012
Time: 6- 8pm
Venue: Old Theatre

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|. Read more in our news archive here|.

The findings of research on popular economies in South Africa, led by Deborah James, have been published in a special issue of Africa, the journal of the International African Institute.

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).

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 annual Malinowski Memorial Lecture (given in 2012 by Dr Alpa Shah from Goldsmiths, University of London) to regional seminars, a weekly research seminar, and a host of conferences and workshops.

Upcoming events:

Workshop on Irony, Cynicism, and the Chinese State
|4th & 5th June 2012

Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India
Professor Akhil Gupta (UCLA)|
6-8pm Monday 11th June 2012

Anthropology in London 2012
Certainty? A one-day conference
|UCL, Monday 11 June 2012

Every Friday during term time we hold a research seminar on anthropological theory between 10:30am and 12:30pm in the Seligman Library (OLD 6.05).

Details speakers and their topics for Summer Term 2012 are given below.

27 April

Carlos Fausto (Museu Nacional, Rio)

How much for a song? The culture of calculation and the calculation of culture among the Kuikuro of Upper Xingu (Amazonia, Brazil)

4 May

Susan Gal (University of Chicago)

The taste of talk: Qualia and the moral flavor of signs

11 May

Matt Wilde (LSE)

“All he does is talk, talk, talk…”: an ethnography of factionalism, leadership and popular power in Chávez’s Venezuela

18 May

Emmanuel de Vienne (LSE)

Make yourself uncomfortable. Joking relationship as predictable uncertainty among the Trumai (Brazilian Amazonia)

25 May

Kurt Beck (University of Bayreuth)

The African road. Road and roadside institutions on the Forty Days Road, Sudan

1 June

Yang Jie (Simon Fraser University)

Behind the stories of the womb: body, infralanguage, and sovereignty in China

8 June

Liu Xin (UC Berkeley)

Kant in today’s China

15 June

John Borneman (Princeton University)

Emotional containment in interlocution-based fieldwork

22 June

Susan Bayly (University of Cambridge)

The moral cartography of renovation in late-socialist Vietnam

29 June

Ruben Andersson (LSE)

Title tba

PhD Theses|

Tom Boylston The shade of the divine: Approaching the sacred in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian community

Rebecca Chamberlain-Creanga Cementing modernisation: Transnational markets language and labour tension in a Soviet-era factory in Moldova

Kimberly Chong The work of financialisation: An ethnography of a global management consultancy in a post-Mao China

I-Chieh Fang Growing up and becoming independent: an ethnographic study of new generation migrant workers in China

Eona Bell An anthropological study of ethnicity and the reproduction of culture among Hong Kong Chinese families in Scotland

Irene Calis The Everyday Order of Things: An Ethnographic Study of Occupation in a West Bank Palestinian Village

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

Undergraduate Open Day