Departmental News and Further Information
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LSE Anthropology group on Facebook
Book Prize in Europeanist Anthropology
New Fellows of the British Academy
The Ba-Li Ethnographic Experience at London Anthropology Day 2007
Student Prize and Award Winners 2007 and 2008
LSE Teaching Excellence Awards
Members of Staff on BBC Radio
Helveta joint winner of the TTJ Environmental Achievement Award
Marett Lecture 2007
Dr Luke Freeman in The Guardian
PhD Exchange with Columbia University
Visiting Scholars
In Memory: David McKnight
Special Commendation from the THES and HEA
Laura Ashley Scholarship
ESRC grant awarded to Dr Michael W Scott
European Professorship
Further information
LSE Anthropology now has its own Facebook group. Follow the link to find out more!
Congratulations to Dr Mathijs Pelkmans who has been awarded the 2007 William A. Douglass Book Prize in Europeanist Anthropology by the Society for the Anthropology of Europe for his book Defending the Border: Identity, religion, and modernity in the Republic of Georgia (2006. Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
Professors Chris Fuller and Henrietta Moore are among the thirty eight UK based academics and scholars who were elected Ordinary Fellows of the British Academy in July 2007.
Robin Jackson, Chief Executive and Secretary of the British Academy, said: "Election to Fellowship is the principal way in which the Academy recognises scholarly excellence. It comes as the culmination of a rigorous selection process in which each of the Academy's eighteen Sections, organised by academic discipline, is involved. This year we are pleased to welcome new Fellows from all of the disciplines represented in the Academy, displaying a variety of cutting-edge specialisms, from mediaeval art to game theory, from Islamic history to philosophy of physics, from ethnomusicology to the economic analysis of law."
This year’s Royal Anthropological Institute annual report features a description and photographs of Dr Luke Freeman and Dr Evan Killick conducting the Ba-Li Ethnographic Experience with A level students at the London Anthropology Day 2007. The Experience was devised for the DART project at LSE as a means of giving students insights into the dilemmas of conducting anthropological fieldwork.
Congratulations to the following Anthropology students on their achievements.
Undergraduate Departmental prizes in July 2008:
- The Michael Sallnow Prize for best undergraduate dissertation in the Anthropology Department
Rebecca Sprowles - BSc in Social Anthropology
- The Jean La Fontaine Prize for an outstanding first class degree from the Anthropology Department
Insa Koch - BA Anthropology and Law (winner)
Eleanor Bush - BA Anthropology and Law (honourable mention)
Aula Hariri - BA Social Anthropology (honourable mention)
Current PhD students Denis Regnier and Aude Michelet obtained Wenner-Gren Scholarships in 2007/08.
Julia Belluz, MSc student in social anthropology, is the second winner of the Bernard Levin Award, with her essay London as a Moveable Feast. Julia wrote an original essay split into four 'vignettes' - the first, a conversation about gender-based cultural practices, second, student pursuit of the Italian ice-cream gelato, third, an LSE performance at the Old Vic Theatre and finally, ideas sprung from a trip to Madrid. Read more.
PhD student Alanna Cant obtained a Horniman Award from the RAI in October 2007.
PhD student Elisabeth Engebretsen secured the Radcliffe-Brown Trust Fund / Sutasoma Award 2007. The Trustees state that the award recognizes the potentially outstanding merit of her research.
Dr Amit Desai (PhD 2007) who was one of four recipients of the LSE's Robert McKenzie Prize for 2006/07. The prizes are awarded on the basis of outstanding academic performance during the 2006/07 academic session. The prize is in memory of the late Professor Robert McKenzie a former student and member of staff from 1949. He was also Professor of Sociology with special reference to politics from 1964 to 1981.
The following Anthropology graduates and undergraduates won LSE and Departmental prizes in July 2007:
- The Michael Sallnow Prize for best undergraduate dissertation in the Anthropology Department
Katherine Keenan - BSc in Social Anthropology
- The Jean La Fontaine Prize for an outstanding first class degree from the Anthropology Department
Laura Dixon - BSc in Social Anthropology
Preetha Gopalan - BA in Anthropology and Law
Jessica Owens - BA in Social Anthropology
- Huw Weldon Prize for performance in 3rd year exams
Jessica Owens - BA in Social Anthropology
- CS MacTaggart Prize for best performance in 2nd year exams, with reference to 1st year
Aula Hariri - BSc in Social Anthropology
- CS MacTaggart Prize for best performance in 1st year exams
Charlotte Leigh Kingsman - BA in Social Anthropology
Will Norman (PhD 2005) was joint winner of the 2006 African Studies Association-UK's Audrey Richards Prize for the best thesis on Africa examined in the UK over the past two years.
Danny Bogado (BSc Social Anthropology 2005) won the RAI's Hocart Student Essay Prize for his final-year dissertation, "Batty fi'Dead (Homosexual must die): God, gender, body, and society in the cultural construction of the Jamaican male homosexual."
Congratulations to the following members of staff for the awards and prizes they have obtained in 2007.
- Dr Rita Astuti has been named as one of the five winners of the LSE Students' Union inaugural Teaching Excellence Award in 2007 following her nomination by a group of her current students.
- Dr Matthew Engelke has received a Major Review Teaching Prize in 2006/07 under the aegis of the Academic Staff Development Programme, as did Dr Michael Scott in 2005/06.
- Rebecca Chamberlain-Creanga has been awarded a Graduate Teaching Assistant Prize.
Dr Luke Freeman’s report on the Batwa Pygmies of the Great Lakes region of Africa, The Twa: Rwanda's fogotten victims, was broadcast in two parts on The World Today, BBC World Service on August 14th and 15th 2007.
Several current and former members of staff have been interviewed on Radio 4 about their research. You can listen to their interviews again via the BBC's weblinks:
Henrietta Moore on the business suit on Thinking Allowed
Deborah James on land reform in South Africa on Thinking Allowed
Maurice Bloch on the need for grand theory in anthropology on Thinking Allowed
Charles Stafford on numbers and China on Thinking Allowed
Luke Freeman on Malagasy cows on Journey of a Lifetime
Jerome Lewis on the sounds of the Mbendjele Yaka on Thinking Allowed
Matthew Engelke on Christians who don't read the Bible on Thinking Allowed
At the annual Timber Trades Journal Awards held at The Savoy in London in September, Helveta Ltd jointly won the Environmental Achievement Award for the innovative technology application CIEarth and its deployment in Central Africa. Helveta won the Environmental Achievement Award with its partner Tropical Forest Trust.
CIEarth is an application designed for forest inventory and community resource mapping. It is being used in a joint project combining Helveta, the Tropical Forest Trust, Forest Peoples Programme, the Department of Anthropology London School of Economics (LSE) and Congolaise Industrielle des Bois (CIB), to map the surroundings and sensitive resources of indigenous communities in Congo-Brazzaville and Cameroon. Based on a design by LSE anthropologist Dr Jerome Lewis, non-literate Pygmy tribes are able to use icon-driven handhelds equipped with GPS capabilities to capture the data themselves, which is then used to automatically generate maps in GoogleT Earth and ESRI's ArcView.
Commenting on the deployment of CIEarth at CIB, Dr Lewis said: "The speed and efficiency of the Helveta system has astonished me. In 3 months the Helveta system has done far more than 8 months with the GPS system favored previously."
Patrick Newton, CEO of Helveta, commented: "We are very pleased that CIEarth has been recognized by TTJ for the innovation it delivers in generating fast track inventory mapping. CIEarth brings both significant cost efficiencies and transparency to the mapping process. Our product forms the basis for enhanced inventory management and back-to-stump traceability across the supply chain."
Helveta Limited's CIS (Control Intelligence System) technologies enable the prediction and prevention of environmental and production problems for Blue Chip and Fortune 1000 companies through analysis of real-time data from client physical assets anywhere in the world. Helveta's CIS deploys a sophisticated library of analytics to asset data using a combination of handheld computing and Internet technologies. http://www.helveta.com.
Download the CIB case study.
Nature has published an article about the CIB project (Nature 448, 402-403 (26 July 2007) | doi:10.1038/448402a; Published online 25 July 2007). This is only directly available to Nature subscribers, but a summary can be found on the Science and Development Network web site at http://www.scidev.net/content/features/eng/congolese-pygmies-use-gps-to-save-trees.cfm as can a link to the full Nature article. In addition, there is a podcast dated 26 July 2007 that can be downloaded from the following Nature web page: http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/archivetranscripts.html. The part of the podcast about the CIB project starts at about minute 30.
Professor Jonathan Parry gave the Marett Lecture entitled "Hegemony and resistance: Trade union politics in central India" at the University of Oxford's Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology on 27 April 2007.
See Anthropology unites humankind rather than dividing it in The Guardian for Luke Freeman's excellent response to a Simon Jenkins Guardian article It isn't civilised to draw attention to what divides the human race about how anthropology "buries itself in rainforests and deserts" in search of "lost tribes".
We currently have an exchange programme with the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Please follow the link for further details: Columbia Exchange.
We welcome a number of new visiting research fellows and postdoctoral fellows attached to the department for the academic year 2006/7 including Ms Pan Jie, Dr Jerome Lewis, Dr Luke Freeman, Dr Annu Jalais, Dr Wendy Coxshall, Dr Evan Killick, Mr Nicola Knight, and Dr Laurent Berger.
The Department of Anthropology deeply regrets to learn of the recent death of our emeritus colleague, Dr David McKnight. Dr McKnight was an internationally renowned expert on the Mornington Islanders of northern Queensland, with whom he worked for several decades. One of his last publications, Going the Whiteman’s Way: kinship and marriage among Australian Aborigines, was hailed by Claude Lévi-Strauss as adding ‘a new, intimate, and subtle dimension to a classical field.’
A short obituary has been prepared by Dr Richard Chenhall, reproduced here. A longer version was published in the October 2006 edition of Anthropology Today.
David McKnight died on 14 May 2006, aged 71.
David arrived in Britain from Canada in the early 1960s, taking degrees in anthropology at UCL and then doctoral research at LSE. He went to Australia in 1966, beginning a lifetime of work with the Aboriginal people of Mornington Island. David maintained regular contact with Mornington Islanders for 40 years, spending over six years in this region during 20 fieldtrips. In 1971, David joined LSE's Anthropology Department, where students would remember his charismatic style and enigmatic lecturers about the Australian Aboriginal peoples.
As well as contributing to our understanding of kinship and marriage systems in Australia, David was an early pioneer in connecting understandings of kinship, marriage and social structure with various symbolic systems. His style was always distinctive.
A prolific author of papers and articles, he took early retirement in the late 1990s to live in Rome and write up his research, and was still writing up to his death. David wrote four books during his retirement: People Countries and the Rainbow Serpent: systems of classification among the Lardil of Mornington Island (1999), From Hunting to Drinking: the devastating effects of alcohol on an Australia Aboriginal community (2002), Going the Whiteman's Way: kinship and marriage among Australian Aborigines (2004), and Of Marriage, Violence and Sorcery: the quest for power in Northern Queensland (2005). He left behind an important contribution to anthropology and for the indigenous people with whom he worked.
David will be deeply missed by his large family and generations of students to whom he dedicated so much of his life.
The Times Higher Educational Supplement and Higher Education Academy "E-Tutor of the Year 2005" national competition gave special commendation to Luke Freeman and Jerome Lewis for their work on the DART project.
Their work focused on creating digital tools and teaching innovations that would challenge students to engage critically with ethnographic texts. One tool simulates the way fieldworkers acquire deeper knowledge over time; another asks them to grow rice according to the cultural logic of Malagasy peasants. Rather than being passive readers of texts, students become active assessors of ethnography.
A three year scholarship worth £10,000 plus tuition fees each year was awarded by the department to an incoming MPhil/PhD student in 2006. This scholarship is restricted to women. Eligible applicants are automatically considered for this award on the basis of their LSE Research Studentship application. The next scholarship will be available to an incoming or continuing student in 2009.
Dr Michael W. Scott was awarded an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant to pursue twelve months of ethnographic and archival research in the Solomon Islands. Dr Scott's project, entitled "The Strong Island: Myth Making and Ethnogenesis in a Pacific Nation-State," focused on the role of religion in ethnic identity formation and transformations of the modern nation-state in this Melanesian context. He returned to teaching in January 2007.
Maurice Bloch was appointed the 2005-2006 European Professor at the Collège de France.
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