Departmental Seminar series
These seminars run every week in term-time with invited guest speakers, and cover the full breadth of the discipline.
2018
Bhawani Buswala (Oxford), 'Social life of a license: caste and everyday struggles for work legitimacies in India' (30 November 2018)
Jok Madut Jok (SUNY Upstate Medical University), ''Don't bury the dead': how humanitarianism intervention killed the most vulnerable in Ajiep, South Sudan' (23 November 2018)
David Pratten (SAME, Oxford), 'Militant masks: youth and insecurity in the Niger Delta' (9 November 2018)
Dr Michelle Pentecost (King's College London), 'Trials of the everyday: spaces of global health in South Africa' (2 November 2018)
Frederick Keck (Musée du quai Branly), 'Precolonial microbiome: how microbiologists access anthropology museums to contribute to the debate on restitution' (26 October 2018)
Dr Paolo Heywood (University of Cambridge), 'The grey area: fascism between the general and the particular' (25 May 2018)
Dr Oliver Scott Curry (ICEA, University of Oxford), 'The seven moral rules found all around the world' (18 May 2018)
Professor Marcio Goldman (National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), 'Why are there always Candomblés? Situated knowledges of miscegenation and syncretism in Brazil' (11 May 2018)
Dr Mayanika Mathur (ISCA, University of Oxford), 'A petition to kill: efficacious appeals against big cats in India' (5 May 2018)
Dr Eva Reidl (ICEA, University of Oxford), 'Studying the origins of human material culture in youg children' (2 February 2018)
Professor Maya Unnithan (University of Sussex), 'Rights and justice: reproductive politics and legal activism in India' (26 January 2018)
2017
Dr Rafael Schacter (University College London), 'The promise of the (foreign) image: post-post-internet art from the Philippines (and other notes from the field)' (1 December 2017)
Michael Jackson (Emeritus Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School), 'Existential mobility, migrant imaginaries and multiple selves' (20 October 2017)
Dr Elizabeth Ewart and Dr Wolde Tadesse (School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, Oxford), 'Sustaining one another: enset, animals, and people in the southern highlands of Ethiopia' (13 October 2017)
Professor Elizabeth B. Silva (Professor of Sociology, The Open University), 'Exhibiting Violence and social change in Brazil' (19 May 2017)
Professor Barbara Harriss-White (Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, University of Oxford), 'Women in India's waste economy' (12 May 2017)
Greg Carr (President, Gorongosa Restoration Project, Mozambique), 'The Gorongosa Restoration Project, Mozambique' (5 May 2017)
Professor Steve Rayner (InSIS, University of Oxford), 'Climate, weather culture' (17 February 2017)
Dr Franck Düvell (COMPAS, University of Oxford), 'The great migration of summer 2015: trajectories, journeys and hubs' (20 January 2017)
2016
Dr Jarrett Zignon (University of Amsterdam), 'A war on people: the drug war and the hermeneutic politics of those who resist it' (2 December 2016)
Professor Ed Simpson (SOAS), 'The Indian Village: Marx to Modi' (25 November 2016)
Dr Roger Sansi-Roca (Goldsmiths, University of London), 'The artist and the stone: ethnography of an artistic process' (18 November 2016)
Dr Maya Mayblin (University of Edinburgh), 'A brilliant jewel: celibacy and its malcontents in the Brazilian Catholic Church' (4 November 2016)
Professor Maia Green (University of Manchester), 'Formalization as development: accounting for the proliferation of village savings associations' (28 October 2016)
Dr Marta Rosa Jardim (Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), Brazil), 'The charm of things: ethnography and performance' (20 May 2016)
Professor Joy Hendry (Oxford Brookes University), 'Science, stories and indigenous wisdom: is the wider world waking up at last?' (13 May 2016)
Dr Filip De Boeck (KU Leuven), 'Exploring the city's 'sutures': urban life between want and wish. Examples from the DRCongo' (4 March 2016)
Dr Jennifer Diggins (Oxford Brookes University), 'Plantain island sirens: tales of poverty, fish, and seduction from maritime Sierra Leone' (26 February)
Dr Andrew Sanchez (University of Kent). 'Profane relations: the irony of offensive jokes in India' (19 February 2016)
Dr Mathijs Pelkmans (LSE), 'The fragility of conviction: walking with the Tablighi Jammat in Kyrgyzstan' (12 February 2016)
Dr Lucy Lowe (Edinburgh University), 'The certainty of futures lost: motherhood, Caesarean sections and migration in 'Little Mogadishu', Nairobi' (4 December 2015)
Dr Susan Carvalho (SAME, University of Oxford), Evolutionary origins of technological behaviour: a primate archaeology approach to chimpanzees (27 November 2015)
Dr Idalina Baptista (University of Oxford), Revisiting uncertainty: provisional electricity infrastructure and livelihoods in an African city (13 November 2015)
Professor Alma Gottlieb (University of Illinois), Crossing religious borders: Jewish Cabo Verdeans (6 November 2015)
César Enrique Giraldo Herrera (Somerville College, Oxford), Microbes and other spirits (23 October 2015) (The first few seconds are missing)
Dr Megan Warin (University of Adelaide), 'Fat knowledge', epigenetics and the enchantment of relational biology (16 October 2015)
Dr Lauren Greenwood (University of Sussex), Negotiating enemy lines: the complexities of collaboration with the British military (29 May 2015)
Dr Paloma Gay y Blasco (University of St Andrews), The limits of collaboration: attempting a reciprocal Gypsy/Roman life story (15 May 2015)
Dr Dimitris Papadopoulos (University of Leicester), Stacking ontologies: mundane technoscience in the Silk Mill (13 March 2015)
Dr Christian Groes-Green (Roskilde University Copenhagen), Obsessed by love: erotic magic, delirious love and female power in Mozambique (6 March 2015)
Dr Andrée Grau (University of Roehampton), Anthropology, ethnomusicology, the anthropology of dance: same difference? (27 February 2015)
Dr Emma-Jayne Abbots (University of Wales Trinity St David Lampeter), The agency of eating: mediation, food and the body in highland Ecuador (20 February 2015)
Dr Layla Renshaw (Kingston University London), Lost objects, imaginary assemblages and the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War (6 February 2015)
Dr Emmanuelle Kadya Tall (IRD, Paris), On representation and power: portrait of a Vodun leader in present-day Benin (30 January 2015)
Dr Claudio Sopranzetti (All Souls College, Oxford), Moving the cracks: motorcycle taxis, politics, and the fragility of power in Bangkok (23 January 2015)
Professor David Gellner (ISCA, Oxford), Can there be an anthropology of Hinduism? (5 December 2014)
Dr Catherine Alexander (Durham), Cleaning up and moving on: Kazakhstan's 'nuclear renaissance' (28 November 2014)
Dr Frédéric Keck (Musée de quai Branly), Biosecurity practices in labs and museums: sentinels, simulation, stockpiling (21 November 2014)
Dr Stephen Leonard (ISCA, Oxford), Ways of speaking, ways of knowing: the ethnolinguistic identity of the Inugguit (14 November 2014)
Dr Maja Petrović-Šteger (ISRF and Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts), On forms of mental discipline and understanding of national psyche in contemporary Serbia (31 October 2014)
Dr Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers (Bournemouth), Martyrs, militants and emotions: Albanian radicalisation in Kosovo before 1999 (17 October 2014)
Dr Mette Berg, Dr Ben Gidley, Dr Hiranthi Jayaweera, Dr Ramon Sarró, Intersections: an ethnography of everyday togetherness and intensified diversity in Elephant and Castle (30 May 2014)
Dr Caroline Potter, Dr Ramon Sarró, Dr Zuzanna Olszewska and Professor Clare Harris (ISCA and the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford), Social anthropology of the arts: expression, genre and agency (23 May 2014)
Dr Elizabeth Ewart and Professor Stanley Ulijaszek (ISCA, Oxford), Models, muddles and metaphors (9 May 2014)
Dr Rosana Pinheiro-Machado (ODID, University of Oxford), Intellectual property and informal economy: a commodity chain from China to Brazil through Paraguay (14 March 2014)
Dr Rebecca Empson (University College London), Claiming resources, honouring debts: miners, herders and the land masters of Mongolia (7 March 2014)
Dr Simon Cohn (University of Cambridge), Do not resuscitate orders in a UK hospital: an ethnography of the future-present (28 February 2014)
Rosie Kay (Rosie Kay Dance Company) and Dr Karin Eli (ISCA, University of Oxford), Choreographing lived experience: the stories that dancing bodies tell (21 February 2014)
Dr Morgan Clarke (ISCA, University of Oxford), The sharia as a vocation: Islam, law and civility in Lebanon (14 February 2014)
Professor Timothy Larsen (Wheaton College, Illinois), Victor Turner, anthropology and Christianity (7 February 2014)
Dr Harry Walker (London School of Economics), Discovering 'justice': the magic of law in the Upper Amazon (31 January 2014)
Dr Chris Wilson (ISCA, University of Oxford), The end of history? What follows the demographic transition? (24 January 2014)
Dr Alex Alvergne (ISCA, University of Oxford), The adoption of modern contraception in rural Ethiopia: a biocultural approach (29 November 2013)
Dr Andrew Irving (University of Manchester), New York stories: the lives of other citizens (22 November 2013)
Dr Dimitris Xygalatas (Aarhus University and Masaryk University), Experimenting with field experiments: moving the lab into the field in ethnographic research (8 November 2013)
Dr Henrike Donner (Oxford Brookes University), Of untold riches and unruly homes: gender and property in neoliberal middle-class Kolkata (1 November 2013)
Dr Dace Dzenovska (COMPAS, University of Oxford), Diagnosing intolerance: knowledge practices in postsocialist Europe (25 October 2013)
Professor Joao de Pina-Cabral (School of Conservation and Anthropology, University of Kent), Brazilian serialities: imagining persons (24 May 2013)
Professor Michael Houseman (l'École pratique des hautes études, Paris) Conceptualizing new age and neopagan ritual (17 May 2013)
Dr Gisa Weszkalnys (London School of Economics), Geology, potentiality, speculation: on the indeterminacy of natural resources (10 May 2013)
Dr Julien Bonhomme (École normale supérieure, Paris), Gift, sacrifice and deadly rumours: the moral economy of alms in Senegal (3 May 2013)
Professor William Sax (South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg), Divine kingdoms in the western Himalayas: oracular authority and distributed agency (22 February 2013)
Dr Catherine Dolan (Said Business School, University of Oxford), Capital's new frontier: yoghurt mamas, solar sisters and the remaking of 'unusable Africa' at the bottom of the pyramid (15 February 2013)
Dr Joost Fontein (University of Edinburgh), Re-making the dead, uncertainty and the torque of human materials in northern Zimbabwe (8 February 2013)
Dr Laura Rival (ISCA and QEH, University of Oxford), Rethinking 'Untamed Thoughts' fifty years on: Claude Lévi-Strauss and the science of the concrete (25 January 2013)
Dr Emma Cohen (ICEA, University of Oxford), Synchrony and similarity in human cooperation (30 November 2012)
Dr Frank Marlowe (University of Cambridge), The evolution of human egalitarianism (9 November 2012)
Professor Mike Rowlands (University College London) in collaboration with Dr Graeme Were (Brisbane), Digital heritage technologies and issues of community engagement and cultural restitution in 'New Style' ethnographic museums (2 November 2012)
Dr Matei Candea (University of Durham), Scientists as abstainers: an ethnography of inter-species trust without belief (26 October 2012)
Professor Michael Keith (COMPAS, University of Oxford), City dwelling and the cultures of migrant urbanism (19 October 2012)
Dr Ramon Sarro (ISCA, University of Oxford), The biography of the Holy Ghost: exploring a prophetic landscape in Lower Congo (12 October 2012)
Dr Martin Saxer (Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore), Neighbouring China in Northern Nepal (25 May 2012)
Professor Jonathan Spencer (University of Edinburgh), Conflict in the plural: Eastern Sri Lanka as a complex religious field (18 May 2012
Dr Dhana Hughes (St John's College, University of Oxford), Opportunistic violence and the impossibility of intimacy: Memories of revenge and denunciation in Sri Lanka's Southern Terror (11 May 2012)
Professor Nicola Tannenbaum (Lehigh University), What Shan ethnography can tell us about Theravada Buddhism (4 May 2012)
Professor Ann G Gold (Syracuse University), Sweetness and light: Ordinary pluralisms in a north Indian town (24 February 2012)
Dr Sandra Dudley (University of Leicester), Everyday aesthetics in forced displacement: material culture and Karenni forced migrants in a Thai-Burma border camp (10 February 2012)
Professor Michael Herzfeld (Harvard University), Negotiating space, buying time: The performance of housing politics in a Bangkok community under siege (2 December 2011)
Dr Holger Jebens (University of Frankfurt), Beyond globalisation and localisation: Pluralism in a Papua New Guinea Village (18 November 2011)
Dr Marion Demossier (University of Bath), Beyond 'terroir': Territorial construction, hegemonic discourses and French wine culture (11 November 2011)
Professor Judith Okely (University of Hull), Discovering anthropological practice through fieldwork (4 November 2011)
Dr Helene Basu (University of Münster), Saints of Justice, Spirits of Devastation: Sorcery, madness and modernity in Western India (28 October)
Dr Katy Gardner (University of Sussex), The oil company, 'partnership' and the moralities of giving and receiving: Corporate community engagement comes to Bangladesh (21 October 2011)
Dr Thomas Kirsch (University of Konstanz), Spirit in Motion: Notes on the morphology and mobility of the Holy Spirit in Africa (14 October 2011)
Professor Michael Rowlands (UCL), Re-defining the museal object in Mao and post-Mao China (13 May 2011)
Dr Jakob Klein (SOAS), 'There is no such thing as Dian cuisine!' Food and locality in twenty-first century China (11 March 2011)
Professor Steven Reyna (MPI-Halle), Don't throw the baby out with the bathos: regimes of truth in an anthropology of hypocrisy (25 February 2011)
Professor Roy Ellen (University of Kent), On the concept of cultural transmission (18 February 2011)
Professor Deborah James (London School of Economics), Money-go-round: personal economies of wealth, aspiration and indebtedness in South Africa (11 February 2011)
Dr Ian Reader (University of Manchester), Heritage, hiking and the eradication of miracles: consumerism and the sanitisation of pilgrimage from Shikoku to Santiago (4 February 2011)
Dr Jerome Lewis (University College London), Why do Bayaka Pygmies sing so much? Music, cultural transmission and social structure (28 January 2011)
Professor Jane K. Cowan (University of Sussex), 'League of Nations Minority regime as Anthropological Object' (22 January 2010)
Asst Professor Adam Frank (University of Central Arkansas), 'Re-Tooling a Body with The Body: Three Ways of Teaching Tajiquan to the White Guy' (29 January 2010)
Professor Tania Murray Li (University of Toronto), 'Indigenous capitalism in Upland Indonesia' (5 February 2010)
Dr Faisal Devji (St Antony's College, University of Oxford), 'Dying for Islam' (12 February 2010)
Dr David Graeber (Goldsmiths, University of London), 'Money, Bodies, Materialism and Virtuality' (19 February 2010)
Associate Professor Johan Lindquist (Stockholm University), 'The Elementary School Teacher, the Thug and his Grandmother' (26 February 2010)
Dr Charles Ramble (Oriental Institute, University of Oxford), 'The Mysterious Reluctance of Tibetan Vampire-Slayers in Nepal' (12 March 2010)
Dr Paloma Gay y Blasco (University of St Andrews), Claudia's Life: Singular lives, Gypsy metonymy and ethnographic writing (4 June 2010)
Professor Peter Wade (University of Manchester), Race, kinship, genetics, and the ambivalence of identity (15 October 2010)
Dr Caroline Osella (SOAS, London), Kerala Muslim marriage, gender, and intimacy in a field of neoliberal and reformist tensions (22 October 2010)
Dr James Laidlaw (University of Cambridge), Forms of detachment and ethical regard (29 October 2010)
Dr Stephanie Bunn (University of St Andrews), The power of felted cloth through time and space (Kyrgyzstan) (19 November 2010)
Professor Andre Gingrich (Vienna), Neo-nationalism five years later: a return to 'indigeneity' in Central Europe (26 November 2010)
Dr Felicia Hughes-Freeland (University of Swansea), Dance culture and its dislocaton (3 December 2010)
