Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at All Souls College
I am a social anthropologist and designer whose work is situated at the intersection of visual, material and economic anthropology, textiles and ethnoecology. I am interested in the relationships that craftspeople have with the environments from which they extract and use resources during commodity production. I identify historical and contemporary links that concern the exploitation of ecosystems, workers and underrepresented communities. I have carried out ethnographic work with Harris Tweed weavers in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland (2015) and received a DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford (2021) with a thesis based on twelve months of apprenticeship-based fieldwork with natural dye craftspeople on the island of Amami Oshima, southern Japan. A monograph of my doctoral thesis is currently under review. My current research explores the intersection of textiles and agriculture in diverse geographies - the UK, USA and India. Using comparative ethnography, I am seeking to understand how small-scale producers of natural fibres and dyestuffs are adapting their practices in the context of challenging environmental, social and economic conditions. I ask whether a grassroots approach to regenerative land stewardship and aspirations to work more ethically and sustainably might trickle up, impacting the wider fashion and textiles industries at scale.
Research interests:
- Textile and craft production
- Socio-ecological relations
- Economic anthropology
- Material Culture and museum studies
- Visual, design and apprenticeship methodologies
- Anthropology of Japan
I am available to supervise DPhil students with shared research interests. Please get in touch via email.
Personal Website: www.charlottelinton.com
All Souls Profile: https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/person/dr-charlotte-linton
Email: charlotte.linton@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
Selected Publications:
2022: Re-evaluating a tree’s ‘real worth’: The historical dispossession of ecological stewardship and its legacy for a Japanese textile tradition. History and Anthropology. DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2022.2116017
2022: ‘The Mejiro bird: between commodity, conservation and companion’ in Animals matter: Resistance and transformation in animal commodification. J. Dugnoille & E. Vander Meer (eds.) Leiden: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/9789004528444_005
2020: “Making it for our country”: An ethnography of mud-dyeing on Amami Ōshima island. TEXTILE 18:3, 249-276, DOI: 10.1080/14759756.2019.1690837
