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Home > Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
Home
Anthropology
About us
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Department of Anthropology
6th Floor, Old Building
London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE
Head of Department
Professor Katy Gardner
Departmental Manager
Ms Yanina Hinrichsen
+44 (0)20 7955 7202
Administrator
Mr Tom Hinrichsen (Thu & Fri)
+44 (0)20 7955 6775
Administrative Officer
Ms Andrea Elsik
+44 (0)20 7107 5037
Administration and Communications Officer
Ms Renata Todd
+44 (0)20 7852 3709
Fax: +44 (0)20 7404 4907
General Enquiries
anthropology.enquiries@lse.ac.uk
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 undergraduate teaching and training of PhD students is recognised
as outstanding.
Follow this link to see a short film about the Department and some of its students.
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News
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Events
PhDs 2012-15
LSE Department of Anthropology tops the
University guide 2017 league table for anthropology
We were thrilled to see that the University guide 2017 announced LSE as having the best
anthropology department. To see the full league table, click here
YEAR ABROAD
We are thrilled to announce that we have established a Departmental exchange arrangement with
the University of Melbourne, offering undergraduate students reading Social Anthropology or
Anthropology and Law the opportunity to spend a Year Abroad in Australia as part of their
degree. This is in addition to the School-wide exchanges with Sciences-Po and the University of
California, Berkeley.
The Melbourne anthropology department is widely recognised as amongst the best in the world,
with particular expertise in anthropology of migration, the body and the environment. Students
taking a Year Abroad at Melbourne will also be able to select from a wide range of outside
options, including in subjects not available at the LSE. We're very excited about this addition to
our programme.
LSE ANTHROPOLOGY RANKS TOP FOR STUDENT
SATISFACTION
The latest NSS results reveal LSE to be the best anthropology department for student satisfaction
across the Russell Group. Students from our 2015 cohort awarded us a mark of 4.7 for overall
satisfaction (out of a possible 5), putting us ahead of rival institutions such as Cambridge, Oxford
and UCL. We also received the highest marks of any Russell Group institution for our teaching,
with 100% of students praising the intellectual stimulation of the course, and the enthusiasm of
the lecturers. Interested in joining us? To find out more about our courses click here
ALTERNATIVES TO AUSTERITY?
Department of Anthropology public conversation
Date: Thursday 9 June 2016
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building
Speakers: Dr Laura Bear, Anna Coote, Dr Andrea Muehlebach, Dr Carly Schuster
Chair: Professor Deborah James
BOOK LAUNCH
Wednesday, 10 February 2016
6.00pm-8.00pm
Seligman Library, Old Building
Discussants: William A. Callahan (LSE) and Caroline Humphrey (Cambridge)
Unprecedented social change in China has intensified the contradictions faced by ordinary
people. In everyday life, people find themselves caught between official and popular discourses,
encounter radically different representations of China's past and its future, and draw on widely
diverse moral frameworks.
This volume explores irony and cynicism as part of the social life of local communities in China,
and specifically in relation to the contemporary Chinese state. It collects ethnographies of irony
and cynicism in social action, written by a group of anthropologists who specialise in China.
They use the lenses of irony and cynicism - broadly defined to include resignation, resistance,
humour, ambiguity and dialogue - to look anew at the social, political and moral contradictions
faced by Chinese people. The various contributions are concerned with both the interpretation of
intentions in everyday social action and discourse, and the broader theoretical consequences of
such interpretations for an understanding of the Chinese state.
As a study of irony and cynicism in modern China and their implications on the social and
political aspects of everyday life, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of
social and cultural anthropology, Chinese culture and society, and Chinese politics.
https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138943148
Dr Ruben Andersson, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Civil Society and Human Security
Research Unit within the Department of International Development, has won the British
Sociological Association / BBC Thinking Allowed (Radio 4) ethnography award for his book
Illegality, Inc. Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe.
The book argues that increasing border controls leads migrants to seek more dangerous routes to
enter Europe. It is based on his PhD dissertation awarded from the Department of Anthropology,
LSE for which he won the 2014 IMISCOE – Maria Ioannis Baganha dissertation award. One of
the judges said: ‘…it was very powerful; it was a very beautifully written very evocative
book…’
The shortlist was announced in Thinking Allowed on 15 April and the programme ran a special
on the book on 22 April.
Lessons in Development. Click here to listen to Alpa Shah on BBCr4 Four Thought on
democracy, mining and tribal people.
Promises, Promises: A History of Debt. Click here to listen to David Graeber's 10 part series
on BBC Radio 4 where he explores the ways debt has shaped society over 5,000 years.
LSE Student Led Teaching Excellence Awards 2015
Congratulations to Matt Wilde, who has been announced the winner in the category of LSESU
Award for Excellent Welfare and Pastoral Support.
The LSE's Student Led Teaching Excellence Awards are run by the Students’ Union, supported
by the Teaching and Learning Centre and sponsored by the Annual Fund. This year 1362
nominations were received from students, with nominations for 555 individual members of staff.
LSE student honoured at prestigious Chinese language competition
Angel Naydenov, undergraduate student in the Department of Anthropology, has won an award
for ‘The Best Performance’ at the UK finals of the Chinese Bridge College Student Competition.
The competition, which runs annually, contains a three minute speech in Mandarin, two minutes
of questions on Chinese language, culture and geography, and a three minute talent show. Angel,
who is from Bulgaria and studying Mandarin Language and Society Advanced Level, competed
against 30 candidates from 15 universities across the UK to reach the finals, where he went up
against another nine candidates. This is the second time LSE has won an award in the
competition - last year Edward Knight, from the Department of International Relations, won
another individual award for 'The Most Eloquent'.
Chinese Student Migration, Gender and Family by Anni Kajanus follows the sons and daughters
of Chinese single-child families who go abroad to study and their families; exploring the increase
of familial investment in daughters' education within the wider socio-moral transformation of
China. The relationships of support in the family are renegotiated, and lines of generational and
gendered power are changing. While this generation of young women have been raised in an
environment that fosters individual achievement and competition, they must eventually find their
place in the marriage and job markets that are highly gendered. Women are directed towards less
demanding career paths and are wary of becoming 'too successful' to marry. Both female and
male student migrants draw from their cosmopolitan experiences and resources when negotiating
these tensions. Through their individual journeys of migration, they are at the forefront of the
current transformation of the Chinese symbolic markets.
The revolution that brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power in South Africa was
fractured by internal conflict. In analyzing this conflict, Jason Hickel contributes to broad
theoretical debates about liberalism and democratization in the postcolonial world. Democracy as
Death interrogates the Western ideals of individual freedom and agency from the perspective of
those who oppose such ideals, and questions the assumptions underpinning theories of antiliberal movements. The book argues that both democracy and the political science that attempts
to explain resistance to it presuppose a model of personhood native to Western capitalism, which
may not operate cross-culturally.
Money from Nothing by Deborah James explores the dynamics surrounding South Africa's
national project of financial inclusion—dubbed "banking the unbanked"—which aimed to extend
credit to black South Africans as a critical aspect of broad-based economic enfranchisement. The
book reveals the varied ways in which middle- and working-class South Africans' access to
credit is intimately bound up with identity, status-making, and aspirations of upward mobility. It
draws out the precarious nature of both the aspirations and the economic relations of debt which
sustain her subjects, revealing the shadowy side of indebtedness and its potential to produce new
forms of oppression and disenfranchisement in place of older ones. Money from Nothing captures
the lived experience of indebtedness for those many millions who attempt to improve their
positions (or merely sustain existing livelihoods) in emerging economies.
In this book, C. J. Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan examine one particularly striking group:
Tamil Brahmans—a formerly traditional, rural, high-caste elite who have transformed
themselves into a new middle-class caste in India, the United States, and elsewhere.
The Social Life of Achievement, edited by Nick Long and Henrietta Moore. This theoretically
eclectic volume promises to be of interest to anyone with interests in the anthropology of
education, the anthropology of neoliberalism, theories of agency and motivation, or the study of
ethical life.
Featuring contributions by Richard Baxstrom, Laura Bear, Åsa Boholm, John Gledhill, Deborah
James, Sarah Lund, Halvard Vike, and an introduction by Simone Abram and Gisa Weszkalnys,
this volume and links planning to a set of anthropological concerns regarding the state,
development, entitlement, agency and the imagination.
Fenella Cannell's book Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship, published
in August 2013, will be of interest to anyone who wishes to gain a different perspective on the
concept of modernity itself, and on the place of kinship and 'family' in modern life.
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.
LSE Anthropology holds many events throughout the year, ranging from the annual Malinowski
Memorial Lecture to regional seminars, a weekly research seminar, and a host of conferences
and workshops. To view details of all our events, please click here
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). Follow the link (which is in red) for
details of speakers, and the dates and titles of their papers.
Speakers for Summer Term are:
David Graeber The People as Nursemaids of the King: notes on monarchs as children,
women's uprisings, and the return of the ancestral dead in central Madagascar
Yunxiang Yan The Rise of Neo-Familism in Contemporary China
Dan Smer Yu Trans-Himalayan Secularities: Buddhist Governance and Social Engagement in
Modern Burma, India, and Tibet
Geoff Hughes Towards an Anthropological Theory of Envy: Insights from Middle Eastern
Ethnography
Chris Martin School Pageants and Educational Spectacle in the Philippines
Ryan Davey “You can’t argue with them”: domination in the time of debt)
Fernande Pool “We don't want your freedom”: the imagination of virtue among Muslim
Bengalis
The Programme for Religion and Non-Religion offers a number of Forum on Religion events
which are free and open to all.
PhD Theses
Christopher Martin Generations of Migration: Schooling, youth and transnationalism in the
Philippines
Fernande Pool The ethical life of Muslims in secular India. Islamic reformism in West Bengal
Francesca Mezzenzana Living through forms: similarity, knowledge and gender among the
Runa of Pastaza (Ecuadorian Amazon)
Andrea Pia The vanishing margin: an ethnography of rural water provisions in the
environmentally degraded Chinese countryside
Amy Penfield Material morality: an ethnography of value among the Sanema of Venezuelan
Amazonia
Johanna Whiteley The ancestors remain: dynamics of matrilineal continuity in West Gao, Santa
Isabel, Solomon Islands
Christian Laheij A country of trial: Islamic reformism, pluralism and dispute management in
Peri-Urban Northern Mozambique
Di Wu The everyday life of Chinese migrants in Zambia: emotion, stability and moral
interaction
Michael Berthin Touch future x ROBOT: examining production, consumption, and disability at
a social robot research laboratory and a centre for independent living in Japan
Tamara Hale Mixing and its challenges: an ethnography of race, kinship and history in a
village of Afro-indigenous descent in coastal Peru
Jovan Lewis Sufferer’s market: sufferation and economic ethics in Jamaica
Mohamed Zaki And they say there aren't any gay Arabs: ambiguity and uncertainty in Cairo's
underground gay scenes
Ana Gutierrez-Garza The everyday moralities of migrant women: life and labour of Latin
American domestic and sex workers in London
Zorana Milicevic Children and the benefits of gender equality: negotiating traditional and
modern gender expectations in a Mexican village
Sarah Grosso Extraordinary ethics: an ethnographic study of marriage and divorce in Ben Ali's
Tunisia
Miranda Sheild Johansson To work is to transform the land: agricultural labour, personhood
and landscape in an Andean ayllu
Anna Tuckett The ambiguities of documentation: migrants' everyday encounters with Italian
immigration law
Sitna Quiroz Uria Relating as Children of God: Ruptures and Continuities in Kinship among
Pentecostal Christians in the South-East of the Republic of Benin
Xiaoqian Liu The state through its mirrors: an anthropological study of a ‘Respect-the-Elderly
Home’ in Rural China at the turn of the 21st century
Gustavo Barbosa Non-cockfights: on doing / undoing gender in Shatila, Lebanon
Daniela Kraemer Planting roots, making place: an ethnography of young men in Port Vila,
Vanuatu
Marek Mikus What reform? Civil societies, state transformation and social antagonism in
'European Serbia'
Gus Gatmaytan Indigenous autonomy amid counter-insurgency: cultural citizenship in a
Philippine frontier
Aude Michelet No longer kings: learning to be a Mongolian person in the Middle Gobi
Dina Makram Ebeid Manufacturing stability: everyday politics of work in an industrial steel
town in Hulwan, Egypt
Giulia Liberatore Transforming the self: an ethnography of ethical change amongst young
Somali Muslim women in London
Agnes Hann An ethnographic study of family, livelihoods and women's everyday lives in Dakar,
Senegal
Matthew Wilde We shall overcome: radical populism, political morality and participatory
democracy in a Venezuelan barrio
Dave Robinson Continuity, communion and the Dread: the Maori Rastafari of Ruatoria,
Aotearoa - New Zealand
Yasna Singh Satnami self-assertion and Dalit activism: everyday life and caste in rural
Chhattisgarh (central India)
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
Open Day 2016
1st issue of Argonaut!
REF Results and Other League Tables
LSE/Bloomsbury First-Time Book Competition
A Day in the Life of an LSE Student
Our research
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