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Social Anthropology

Social Anthropology is the comparative study of the ways in which people live in different social and cultural settings across the globe. Societies vary enormously in how they organise themselves, the cultural practices in which they engage, as well as their religious, political and economic arrangements. Social anthropologists study this variation with a view to contributing to a broader understanding of what it is to be human, what unites us as human beings and what makes us so diverse.

Staff interests include:

  • Cultural and cosmological dimensions of risk, play, uncertainty and limits (Allen Abramson)
  • Afriphobia; the politics of identity; critical pedagogy/decolonial praxis; and the social and political anthropology of organisational, curatorial and counter-cultural forms of radical activism resisting racialised forms of spatial or social injustice in public spaces, institutions and grassroots communities (Toyin Agbetu)
  • Financialization and the anthropology of finance, economic imagination and economic decision-making, race and gender in the global economy, and economic subjectivities in contemporary China and the UK (Kimberly Chong)
  • Social anthropology of the environment in indigenous Amazonia; multispecies ethnography in the Anthropocene; the politics of conservation and sustainable development (Lewis Daly)
  • The relationship between conceptions of personhood and new economic forms in Mongolia and other parts of Inner and East Asia (Rebecca Empson)
  • Cosmology, ritual and politics in revolutionary Cuba, and the relationship between anthropological and philosophical analysis (Martin Holbraad)
  • The sociality of tax and dynamics of fiscal systems; agricultural labour and the value of work; research in the Andean region and Northern Europe (Miranda Sheild Johansson)
  • Play, music, ritual, and egalitarian politics among Central African hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers' and indigenous peoples' rights and representation (Jerome Lewis)
  • Anthropology of education, social class and youth, personhood and ethics in the context of Post-Industrial UK (Alison Macdonald)
  • Migration and post-socialism in Europe and Asia, including research in Germany, Southern Europe, Turkey and Central Asia (Ruth Mandel)
  • Anthropology of religion, religious difference, kinship and marriage in the context of middle-class Pakistan (Ammara Maqsood)
  • Anthropology of democracy, kinship and politics, charisma, crime and political violence in South Asia and Venezuela (Lucia Michelutti)
  • The violent aftermaths of war, genocide, and revolution, in liberal imperial states as much as in those of the colonial margins of Africa and Europe, examined from the perspective of language, difference, racisms, democracy, sovereignty, (post/de)coloniality (Marcas Mag Oireachtaigh)
  • Linguistic anthropology, The architecture of the Kurdish language, Translation in times of war (Alex Pillen)
  • The anthropology of history, focusing on ritual, sacred sites and tourism in the Mediterranean area (Charles Stewart)
  • Historical, political and economic anthropology focusing on Roma, as well as collaborative anthropology and documentary film-making (Michael Stewart)

We have a weekly public Social Anthropology research seminar, with speakers invited from across the world to present and discuss their work. Our staff and research students also contribute to a variety of reading and research groups.