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 recognised as outstanding.

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

News
Publications
Events
PhDs 2011-13

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.

Congratulations to Jason Hickel, who has been awarded one of this year's two ASA (Association of Social Anthropologists)/HEA (Higher Education Academy) teaching awards for Excellence in Teaching Anthropology

On Friday 8th March 2013, the Association for Cypriot, Greek and Turkish Affairs convened the first Peter Loizos Memorial Lecture. The lecture, given by Dr Rebecca Bryant (A. N. Hadjiyannis Senior Research Fellow, European Institute, LSE) was titled ‘Being Between: Thinking with Peter Loizos’ Legacy’

Dr Giles Fraser, former Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral has been appointed as a visiting professor in the Programme for the Study of
Religion and Non-Religion.

Matthijs Pelkmans writes about 'Chaos and Order along the (Former) Iron Curtain' in Blackwell's A Companion to Border Studies|, published in May 2012.

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|.

Harry Walker’s book Under a Watchful Eye: Self, Power and Intimacy in Amazonia|, published in November 2012 examines the formation of self among the Urarina, an Amazonian people of lowland Peru and raises fundamental questions about what it means to be alive, to be an experiencing subject, and to be human.

Potent Landscapes: Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia|, by Catherine Allerton, has recently been published by the University of Hawai'i Press. Based on two years of fieldwork in rural Flores, the book situates Manggarai place-making and mobility within the larger contexts of human-environment interactions. Potent Landscapes will appeal to students and specialists of Southeast Asia and to those interested in the comparative anthropological study of place and environment.

Maurice Bloch’s book In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies was published in November 2012. It offers an accessible introduction to fundamental human questions such as: What is human sociality? How are universals such as truth and doubt variously demonstrated and negotiated in different cultures?

Ordinary Ethics in China|, edited by Charles Stafford, has been published by Bloomsbury as part of the LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology series. The book includes chapters by LSE faculty and former students including Laura Bear, Hans Steinmuller, Stephan Feuchtwang, Eona Bell, James Johnston and Daniel Roberts.

Hans Steinmuller’s book Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China|, has been published by Berghahn Books. An ethnographic study of the village of Zhongba (in Hubei Province, central China), the book attempts to grasp the ethical reflexivity of everyday life in rural China. Drawing on descriptions of village life, interspersed with targeted theoretical analyses, Steinmuller examines how ordinary people construct their own senses of their lives and their futures in everyday activities.

Mathijs Pelkmans’ title, Ethnographies of Doubt: Faith and Uncertainty in Contemporary Societies| has recently been published by I.B. Tauris. The volume contains several chapters by members and friends of the LSE Anthropology department: Alpa Shah on doubting revolutionaries; Maurice Bloch on types of shared doubt among Zafimaniry forest-dwellers; Giulia Liberatore on the doubtful belief of newly practicing Muslim women; and Mette High on doubting the cosmos in Mongolia.

In this new study: Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge|, Maurice Bloch proposes that an understanding of cognitive science enriches, rather than threatens, the work of social scientists. Arguing for a naturalist approach to social and cultural anthropology, Bloch introduces developments in cognitive sciences such as psychology and neurology and explores the relevance of these developments for central anthropological concerns: the person or the self, cosmology, kinship, memory and globalisation.

Michael Scott has contributed a chapter on 'Seventh-day Adventism and interdenominational relations in the Solomon Islands' to Christian Politics in Oceania|, a new edited volume by Matt Tomlinson and Debra McDougall.

LSE Anthropology holds many events| throughout the year, ranging from the annual Malinowski Memorial Lecture| (given in 2013 by Dr Andrew Beatty of Brunel University) to regional seminars, a weekly research seminar, and a host of conferences and workshops.

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).

Speakers in Summer Term 2013 include:

David Henig (University of Kent)

Nicolette Makovicky (University of Oxford)

Alpa Shah (LSE)

Ieva Raubisco (University of Latvia)

Marloes Janson (SOAS)

Don Kalb (CEU/Utrecht University)

The Programme for Religion and Non-Religion| offers a number of Forum on Religion events| which are free and open to all.

The Programme for Culture and Cognition| has launched a new 'Interdisciplinary Seminar on Human Cooperation|' to run during Summer 2013.

Regional Seminars which took taking place during Michaelmas and Lent Terms 2012/13 included the Austronesia Research Seminar| and the LSE Africa Seminars|.

PhD Theses|

Ruben Andersson Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe

Hakem al-Rustom Anatolian fragments: Armenians between Turkey and France

Michael Hoffmann Patronage, exploitation and the invisible hand of Mao Tse Tung in an urban municipality in western Nepal

Alanna Cant Practising aesthetics: artisanal production and politics in a woodcarving village in Oaxaca, Mexico

Daniel Roberts The family in changing China: a local history of kinship in rural Zhejiang province

Cathrine Furberg Moe Peripheral nationhood: being Israeli in Kiryat Shemona

Denis Regnier Why not marry them?: history, essentialism and the condition of slave descendants among the southern Betsileo (Madagascar)

Luca Pes Building political relations: cooperation, segmentation and government in Bancoumana (Mali)

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

Inequality and Poverty Research - Postdoctoral Fellowships

NEW! MSc Religion in the Contemporary World

Undergraduate Open Day