Astuti, Rita


Dr Rita Astuti  

Department

Position held

Department of Anthropology

Reader in Social Anthropology

Experience keywords:

cognitive psychology; identity; cognitive anthropology; Madagascar; cross cultural studies; gender; developmental psychology; kinship

Research summary > [Click to expand]

Rita Astuti is an expert in the anthropology of Madagascar. Her first period of extensive fieldwork among Vezo fishing people took place in the late 1980s, and focused on kinship, personhood, gender, and identity. Since then, she has revisited her ethnographic findings through a research project on how Vezo children and adults categorise the social world and how they conceptualise the distinction between "us" and "them."

This work has been undertaken in close collaboration with leading developmental psychologists and has involved the use of experimental techniques in conjunction with more traditional anthropological methods.

Dr Astuti has since been awarded an ESRC Research Fellowship (2002-2005), which has allowed her to continue her interdisciplinary research. She has spent a year at the Laboratory of Developmental Studies at Harvard University, and has undertaken further research in Madagascar on Vezo children's acquisition of religious concepts and on the development of the concept of biological life and death.

Languages:

French [Spoken: Intermediate, Written: Basic]; Italian [Spoken: Fluent, Written: Fluent]; Malagasy [Spoken: Fluent, Written: Basic]

Contact Points

LSE phone number:

020 7955 7206

Publications

The following references are sourced from LSE Research Online|. References that are linked lead to the full text.

2008

Astuti, Rita and Harris, Paul L. (2008) Understanding mortality and the life of the ancestors in rural Madagascar. Cognitive science, 32 pp. 713-740. ISSN 0364-0213

2007

Astuti, Rita (2007) La moralité des conventions: tabous ancestraux à Madagascar. Terrain: carnets du patrimoine ethnologique, 48 pp. 101-112. ISSN 0760-5668

Astuti, Rita (2007) Weaving together culture and cognition: an illustration from Madagascar. Intellectica, (46/47). pp. 173-189. ISSN 0769-4113

Astuti, Rita (2007) Ancestors and the afterlife. In: Whitehouse, Harvey and Laidlaw, James, (eds.) Religion, anthropology, and cognitive science. Carolina Academic Press, Durham, N.C., pp. 161-178. ISBN 9781594601071

Stafford, Charles and Astuti, Rita and Parry, J. P, (eds.) (2007) Questions of anthropology. Berg, London, UK. ISBN 9781845207496

Astuti, Rita (2007) What happens after death? In: Astuti, Rita and Parry, Jonathan and Stafford, Charles, (eds.) Questions of anthropology. Berg, Oxford, UK, pp. 227-247. ISBN 9781845207489

2001

Astuti, Rita (2001) Are we all natural dualists? A cognitive developmental approach. The Malinowski Memorial Lecture, 2000. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 7 (3). pp. 429-447. ISSN 1467-9655

Astuti, Rita (2001) Comment on F. J. Gil-White's article 'Are ethnic groups biological "species" to the human brain? Essentialism in our cognition of some social categories'. Current anthropology, 42 (4). pp. 536-537. ISSN 0011-3204

2000

Astuti, Rita (2000) Les gens ressemblent-ils aux poulets?: Penser la frontière homme-animal à Madagascar / Do people resemble chickens? Thoughts about the animal-human borderline in Madagascar. Terrain: revue d'ethnologie de l'Europe, (34). pp. 89-105. ISSN 1777-5450

Astuti, Rita (2000) Kindreds, cognatic and unilineal descent groups : new perspectives from Madagascar. In: Carsten, Janet, (ed.) Cultures of relatedness : new approaches to the study of kinship. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 90-103. ISBN 052165193x

1999

Astuti, Rita (1999) At the centre of the market: a Vezo woman. In: Day, Sophie and Papataxiarchis, Euthymios and Stewart, Michael, (eds.) Lilies of the field: how marginal people live for the moment. Westview Press, Boulder, CO, pp. 83-95. ISBN 9780813335315

1998

Astuti, Rita (1998) 'It's a boy', 'It's a girl!' : reflections on sex and gender in Madagascar and beyond. In: Lambek, Michael and Strathern, Andrew, (eds.) Bodies and persons : comparative perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 29-52. ISBN 0521621941

1995

Astuti, Rita (1995) People of the sea: identity and descent among the Vezo of Madagascar. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. ISBN 0521433509

1993

Astuti, Rita (1993) Food for pregnancy. Procreation, marriage and images of gender among the Vezo of western Madagascar. Social anthropology, 1 (3). pp. 277-290. ISSN 1469-8676

Astuti, Rita and Solomon, Gregg A. and Carey, Susan Constraints on conceptual development : a case study of the acquisition of folkbiological and folksociological knowledge in Madagascar. In: Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. , pp. 1-135. ISSN 0037-976X

LSE Research Online is the primary resource for references to publications. For queries or updates please email the LSE Research Online team at lseresearchonline@lse.ac.uk|.

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