UCL Conference “The Bodily AND Material Cultures of Religious Subjectivation” 17-­18 June 2014 Bios of Participants (in alphabetic order) Brian Brazeal is an Associate Professor of anthropology at California State University, Chico. He is the founder and director of the Advanced Laboratory for Visual Anthropology. His research interests include the religious dimensions of the global emerald trade as well as the African derived religions of Brazil. bcbrazeal@csuchico.edu Relevant Publications -­‐ “Indian Religions in the Global Emerald Trade” in The Visual Anthropology Review. 28 (2) 120-­‐132. Fall 2012. -­‐ “The Fetish and the Stone: A Moral Economy of Charlatans and Thieves.” Accepted for publication in an edited volume titled Spirited Things: The Work of Possession in Black Atlantic Religions. Paul Johnson ed. the University of Chicago Press. In Press. -­‐ “Digital Cinema for Anthropological Research: The Advanced Laboratory for Visual Anthropology at California State University, Chico” in Anthropology News, March 2013. Timothy Carroll is in the final stages of his doctoral programme in anthropology at UCL. His thesis, currently titled “Moral Fabric: Textiles and the autopoiesis of ethical subjects and objects” focuses on the use of textiles within Eastern Orthodox Christian worship. He is also a Teaching Fellow in Anthropology and Material Culture at UCL, where among other things he teaches Anthropology of Art and Design. Before starting his doctoral research, Timothy received his masters in Material and Visual Culture at UCL, having written his dissertation on shoes as a cross-­‐cultural social phenomenon, and as an extension to the body in the performance of technical action. Timothy started in anthropology at Biola University, in Los Angeles, where he took a degree in Linguistic Anthropology. t.carroll@ucl.ac.uk Liz Fox is an anthropology doctoral candidate, at the Department of Anthropology, UCL, currently enrolled in the Anthropology MRes. She graduated from UCL in 2013 with a BSc in Anthropology. From 2010 until 2012 she worked in the department’s Ethnographic Collection as an assistant curator, overseeing the audit of the collection, offering practical assistance to local and visiting scholars, and presenting objects from the collection at Department Open Days, and Workshops. Her current work is focused in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and research interests include material self-­‐presentation, performativity, linguistic anthropology and the intimate lives of young women in the context of the Mongolian ‘Wolf Economy’. elizabeth.fox.10@ucl.ac.uk 1
Emma Gobin is currently a post-­‐doctoral fellow at the Excellence Network “Creation, Art, Heritage” (Labex CAP, Université Paris I Panthéon-­‐Sorbonne). She has studied Afro-­‐Cuban religions since 2002 and holds a PhD in anthropology from Paris Ouest University (“Un complexe sacerdotal afro-­‐cubain: les santeros, les babalaos et la réflexivité critique”, 2012). She has recently co-­‐edited a special issue of the French journal Ateliers d’Anthropologie on Afro-­‐Cuban religious practices (n°38). gobin_e@yahoo.fr; emma.gobin@mae.u-­‐paris10.fr Emilie Guitard is a doctoral candidate in social anthropology, Paris Ouest La Défense University/ LESC/IRD/CEMAF and Teaching and Research Temporary Attaché (ATER), department of anthropology, Paris Ouest La Défense University. Her dissertation is entitled “The great chief must be like the great trash pile; waste management, subjectivation and exercise of authority in urban Cameroon (Garoua and Maroua)" under the direction of M. Houseman (CEMAF/EPHE) and C. Seignobos (IRD/Paris 1 University), Paris Ouest La Défense University/Laboratoire d'Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparative (LESC)/Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD)/Centre d’Etude des Mondes Africaines (CEMAF). emilie.guitard@gmail.com; www.mae.u-­‐
paris10.fr/lesc/spip.php?article127; https://u-­‐paris10.academia.edu/EmilieGuitard Relevant Publications -­‐ 2012, "Le chef et le tas d'ordures : la gestion des déchets comme arène politique et attribut du pouvoir au Cameroun", Politique Africaine, 127(3), pp.155-­‐177. -­‐ October 2012: “The great chief must be like the great trash pile”. A political anthropology of waste in the urban african context (North Cameroon)”, “Anthropology of waste” series, Anthropology News, American Anthropological Association, www.anthropology-­‐
news.org/index.php/2012/10/18/the-­‐greatchief-­‐must-­‐be-­‐like-­‐the-­‐great-­‐trash-­‐pile Michael Houseman is full professor of anthropology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), and member of the Institute of African Worlds (IMAf) in Paris. He has undertaken field research in Southern Cameroun, Benin, and French Guyana and has published extensively on kinship and social organisation, and on initiation and rituel performance. He is notably the author of Naven or the Other Self. A Relational Approach to Ritual Action (Brill, 1998, with C. Severi), and of Le rouge est le noir. Essais sur le ritual (Presses Universitaires le Mirail, 2012). His current areas of interest include ceremonial dance and emergent forms of ritual practice. houseman@attglobal.net Priya Joshi is a final year student at the Department of Anthropology, UCL. Her current work focuses on intersectionality and its manifestations in digital spaces, specifically the ways in which women of colour are appropriating new media to reclaim their online narratives. She has been working in the department’s Ethnographic Collection since the beginning of the year. priya.joshi.11@ucl.ac.uk 2
Laurel Kendall (PhD with distinction from Columbia University, 1979) is Chair of the Anthropology Division and Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History; she also teaches at Columbia University on popular religion and museum anthropology. A specialist on Korea who also does comparative work in Vietnam, Kendall is the author of Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits (985), The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman (1988), Getting Married in Korea (1996), as well as several articles and edited books. Her recent Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (2009), describes changes in the South Korean shaman world, in tandem with changes in South Korean society since her first fieldwork more than thirty years ago; this book won the Yim Suk-­‐Jay prize as the best work of Korean anthropology by a foreign scholar. Her current research concerns the fate of sacred and magical objects in modern markets. lkendall@amnh.org Katerina Kerestetzi earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (France). She carried out three post-­‐doctoral researches at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris), the Société d’Ethnologie (bourse Eugène Fleischmann, Nanterre), and the Bruno Kessler Foundation (bourse Fernand Braudel, Italy, Trente). She also co-­‐
directed the ethnographic documentary ‘Les morts du palo monte’ (56’). Institutional affiliation: Laboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociologie comparative (LESC)/Université Paris Ouest Nantrerre La Défense. katerinakere@hotmail.com Relevant Publication (forthcoming) Vivre avec les morts : Réinvention et transmission religieuse dans le palo monte (Cuba), Paris: Editions Karthala. Jan Krátký graduated in religious studies and sociology and is currently a doctoral candidate at the Department for the Scientific Study of Religions at Masaryk University. His research interests relate to symbolic and cognitive aspects of artefacts and their role in religious ritual. He is currently a research fellow at LEVYNA, Laboratory for Experimental Research of Religion, based at the Masaryk University in Brno. He is responsible for the experimental projects inspired by recent developments in cognitive sciences, namely theories of embodied and extended cognition. His current research shows that number of competencies traditionally understood as specifically human, such as decision making, should rather be understood as dynamic coming from an interconnection of humans and materiality. Jan is currently working on his PhD thesis “The constitutive role of materiality in a ritual and cognition”. jan.kratky@mail.muni.cz John J. McGraw is a TESIS Research Fellow working at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University. He recently defended his thesis “Divination & Decision-­‐Making: Ritual Techniques of Distributed Cognition in the Guatemalan Highlands” for a PhD in Anthropology and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. His ethnographic and experimental research focuses on the role of objects and materiality in cognition and ritual. quickdraw74@hotmail.com 3
Delphine Mercier is a graduate of Ecole du Louvre, Paris (Master's degree, art history and museology) and of universities of Paris I (License, history) and Paris IV Sorbonne (Maîtrise and DEA, art history). She taught art history and textile history at Ecole du Louvre and Institut National du Patrimoine, Paris, for 10 years. As a specialist of preservation and enhancement of cultural heritage, she was involved in several inventory campaigns (Aube's treasuries churches, Notre-­‐Dame of Paris's treasury). She has conducted international cooperation projects on cultural heritage as head of projects of the French NGO Patrimoine sans frontières (Albanie, Cameroun, France, Haiti, Kossovo, Madagascar). She finally worked for French Ministry of foreign affairs on archeology and cooperation between universities and research institutions in Europe. She started to work in UCL in November 2011 and is now collection manager of the Ethnography collections. mercier.delphine@gmail.com Elsa Mescoli is a doctoral candidate in “Anthropology of Contemporaneity. Ethnography of diversities and of cultural convergences” at University of Milan-­‐Bicocca (Italy) and in “Political and Social Sciences” at University of Liège (joint supervision, defence on 30 April 2014). Her thesis title is “Between recipes of the Self and recipes of the Other: Ethnography of Moroccan culinary practices in Sesto San Giovanni (Milan, Italy).” e.mescoli@doct.ulg.ac.be, elsa.mescoli@gmail.com Relevant publications Mescoli, E. (forthcoming). Les voyages du goût, entre localité et exotisme, in Fumey, G. ; Jackson, P. et Raffard, P. Culture Alimentaires et Territoires, Anthropology of Food. Mescoli, E. (forthcoming). Les transmissions. Cuisine et soin du corps, in aa.vv. Nass Belgika, catalogue de l’exposition, Université Libre de Bruxelles. Mescoli, E. (2013). Islamic food practices in migration context. An ethnography among Moroccan women in Milan, in Toguslu, E.; Leman, J.; Ozdemir, S. eds. Everyday Life Practices of Muslims in Europe: Consumption and Aesthetics, KU Leuven Fethullah Gülen Chair for Intercultural Studies. Urmila Mohan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UCL. Her thesis is currently titled “Clothing as Material of Religious Subjectivity in ISKCON” and is being written under the supervision of Professors Susanne Kuechler and Chris Pinney. It explores the production and use of deity and devotee clothing as forms of sociality and materiality in a contemporary missionising Hindu group that is headquartered in West Bengal, India. Her previous experience and education is in art, design and anthropology (MFA, Pennsylvania State University, U.S.; BFA, National Institute of Design, India; BA (Hons) Victoria Univ. of Wellington, New Zealand) and she brings an applied knowledge of materials as well as a creative sensibility to her scholarly interest in religious practices. u.mohan.11@ucl.ac.uk, www.urmilamohan.com 4
David Morgan is Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University and head of the Department of Religious Studies. He is author of The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (California, 2012), The Lure of Images (Routledge, 2007), The Sacred Gaze (California, 2005), Protestants and Pictures (Oxford, 1999), and Visual Piety (California, 1998). He is a member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and delivered the 2012 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham. Morgan is also co-­‐founder and co-­‐editor of the scholarly journal Material Religion. dm127@duke.edu Hanna Nieber studied African Studies at Leipzig University and received her Master’s degree with a thesis titled “Zanzibari Medicine: The Islamic Practice of Negotiating with a Jinni”. She is now a fellow of Zentrum Moderner Orient and Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies in Berlin while pursuing her interest in the way religious practices shape and are shaped by local sense-­‐making mechanisms. Currently she is working on her PhD, looking at how Muslims and Christians in Zanzibar engage with kombe, a Qur’an-­‐
based medicinal practice. nieber@bgsmcs.fu-­‐berlin.de Christopher Pinney (PhD, Social Anthropology, London School of Economics, 1987) is an anthropologist and art historian. He is currently Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at UCL. Pinney's research has a strong geographic focus in central India: initial ethnographic research was concerned with village-­‐resident factory workers. Subsequently he researched popular photographic practices and the consumption of Hindu chromolithographs in the same area. His publications combine contemporary ethnography with the historical archaeology of particular media (see eg. Camera Indica and Photos of the Gods). The Coming of Photography in India, based on the Panizzi Lectures was published by the British Library in October 2008. Recent book projects include Photography and Anthropology, Zoom: Seeing and Believing in Colonial and Postcolonial India, Lessons From Hell (concerned with popular Indian depictions of punishment), a ‘visual history’ of modern India, and Visual Encounters. c.pinney@ucl.ac.uk Alyssa Ransbury is Head of Operations at a technology startup in Bangladesh, where she currently lives. After receiving a BA in Religious Studies and Sociology/Anthropology from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study and teach in Dhaka. Since then, she has become an advocate for technology as a tool for the empowerment of women and is active in the burgeoning Bengali startup community. Her academic research for this conference delves into the role of performed rituals as explored through her own 500-­‐mile journey on El Camino de Santiago in the summer of 2011. This research was initially analysed in her senior thesis: “A New Lens for an Ancient Road: Interaction Ritual Chains on El Camino de Santiago.” aransbury@gmail.com 5
Raquel Romberg is a socio-­‐cultural anthropologist and author of Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico (2003), and Healing Dramas: Divination and Magic in Puerto Rico (2009), both by the University of Texas Press. Her latest work on the modernity of witchcraft, the poetics of ritual healing, creolization, and possession appeared in several edited volumes and journals: Creolization or Ritual Piracy? (2011); Spiritual Capital (2011); The Moral Economy of Brujería under the Modern Colony (2012); Sensing the Spirits (2012), and The Corporeality and Discourse of Possession (2014). She currently teaches anthropology at Tel Aviv University. rromberg@post.tau.ac.il Sukanya Sarbadhikary is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Presidency University, Kolkata, India. She earned her PhD in Social Anthropology from Trinity College, University of Cambridge in 2012. The title of her thesis is “The Place of Devotion: Siting and Experiencing Divinity in Bengal-­‐Vaishnavism”. sarbadhikary@gmail.com Denise Thorpe is currently an independent scholar and consultant. In 2013 she received her ThD from Duke University in Durham, NC in practical theology with a focus on religion and material culture. Her dissertation “Memory on Fire: The Re-­‐membering of the Lithuanian Body (Politic)” is an ethnographic exploration of All Souls' Day (Vėlinės) practices in Lithuania. Denise is a minister of word and sacrament/teaching elder in the Presbyterian church (USA) and is also trained as a lawyer. During her dissertation work in Lithuania Denise and her husband became very close to the children and staff at two children's homes. This eventually led to their adoption of two children (biological sisters) from Lithuania. Things have been much more lively in their household ever since. denisethorpe@nc.rr.com Jean-­Pierre Warnier (PhD, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, 1975) taught anthropology in Nigeria, Cameroon, and, since 1985, at the University Paris-­‐Descartes. He is now Honorary Professor and research fellow at the Institut des Mondes africains (IMAF -­‐ EHESS), Paris. Since 1972, he did research on the economic and political history of the Cameroon Grassfields. He later shifted to the study of bodily and material cultures as technologies of power. As a member of the “Matière à Penser” research group, he has contributed to its theoretical approach to material culture. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Material Culture (JMC). One of his latest books is The Pot-­King. The Body and Technologies of power. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2007. He is the author of many articles including “Technology as Efficacious Action on Objects…and Subjects” (JMC, 14(4): 459-­‐470, 2009). jp-­‐warnier@wanadoo.fr 6