10 October

Nicholas Thomas (Cambridge)
A Supplement to Tene Waitere's Travels: Maori Carving and Colonial History

17 October

Matei Candea (Cambridge)
Title to be announced

24 October

Mike Rowlands (UCL) and Stephan Feuchtwang (LSE)
Reintroducing Civilisation: Human Historical Types

31 October

Patrick Eisenlohr (Utrecht)
Title to be announced

7 November

Don Slater (LSE Sociology)
Title to be announced

14 November

Rebecca Prentice (Sussex)
“Kidnapping Go Build Back We Economy”: Discourses of Crime and the Moral Imagination in Trinidad

21 November

Daniel Washburn (LSE)
Title to be announced

28 November

Hans Steinmuller (LSE)
State Formation and Local Sociality in central China: From Involution to Intimacy

5 December

Michael Scott (LSE)
The Matter of Makira: Mythologizing People in the Medieval British Isles and in Postcolonial Island Melanesia

12 December

Birgit Meyer (VU Amsterdam)
Title to be announced

8 October

Indira Arumugam (LSE)
Title to be announced

22 October

Jordan Mullard (LSE)
Social Networks and Enduring Groups: Government Jobs and Politics in a Rajasthan Village

5 November

Anderson Jeremiah (Edinburgh University)
Negotiating Local Space: Observations from Rural Paraiyar community in Tamil Nadu

19 November

Anna Laine (University of Gothenburg)
In Conversation with the Kolam Practice: Home Making and Artistic Experiences among Women in Tamilnadu, India

3 December

Louise Tillin (IDS, University of Sussex)
Reorganising the Hindi heartland: the deep politics of state formation

17 January 2008

Professor Signe Howell (University of  Oslo)
Transnational families: the globalisation of adoption norms and the kinning of strangers

13 March 2008

Professor Charles Stafford (LSE)
Logic and emotion in Chinese economic life

In this lecture, Charles Stafford will outline a cognitive anthropological approach to economic psychology, drawing on fieldwork material from rural China and Taiwan.

17 March 2008

Janice Boddy
Anthropology and the Civilizing Mission in Colonial Sudan: Themes and Variations in the Key of Ethnography

The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was a crucible of anthropology. Not only the place where several notable figures did path-breaking research, it was also one of the contexts in which the contribution of ethnography to administration was assayed. The lecture examines the assumptions behind ethnographic information-gathering and practice during Sudan's colonial period, from the first Wellcome expeditions at the turn of the 20th century, through the founding of Sudan Notes and Records in 1919, Dame Margery Perham's description of colonial officers as "unconscious anthropologists," and the different methods adopted by scholars to understand Muslim and non-Muslim Sudanese.

8 May 2008

Dr Emma Tarlo (Goldsmiths College)
Visibly Muslim: An Anthropology of Appearances

At a time when Muslim dress practices are under intense public scrutiny and visible signs of religious affiliation are often represented as a threat to unity, progress and social cohesion, Emma Tarlo considers how an anthropology of appearances might tell a different story.

15th May 2008

Professor Anna Tsing
Supply Chains and the Human Condition

How can scholars tell big stories without abandoning attention to ethnographic texture? Drawing on her work in Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Anna Tsing describes a form of global capitalism in which ethnographic difference structures global connection as much as the other way around. Supply chain capitalism links diverse firms, revitalizing difference and inequality, as workers perform identities that show their agility as independent contractors. Supply chains challenge scholars to use ethnography to understand contemporary global predicaments.

Anna Tsing's current research concerns wild mushroom globalization, capitalism, and multi-species living.

18 June 2008

Professor Amita Baviskar (Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi)
Cows, Cars and Cycle-rickshaws: Bourgeois Environmentalism and the Battle for Delhi's Streets

Abstract: As an embodied public sphere, city streets are sites for multiple exchanges between differently located people and things. This talk focuses on cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws as they navigate Delhi’s roads, and on the people who own, use and seek to control them. All three have been the subject of strenuous efforts at regulation by courts, citizens’ groups and traders’ associations. I interpret these conflicts as instances of bourgeois environmentalism, the (mainly) middle-class pursuit of urban order, hygiene and safety, and ecological conservation. I argue that collective action in the ‘public interest’ by ‘citizens’ concerned about congestion and the collapse of civic infrastructure constitutes a public that excludes the city’s poorer sections. Claims to civic responsibility and environmentalism by bourgeois citizens are contradicted by the simultaneous rise of consumerism in the same social stratum, as expressed in the explosive growth of private car ownership. The talk examines state attempts to regulate the traffic between cars, cows and rickshaws, and concludes by arguing that complex interdependencies avert imminent collision and enable ‘the republic of the street’ to survive.

Biographical note: Amita Baviskar is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of environment and development. Her first book In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley (Oxford University Press) discussed the struggle for survival by adivasis in central India against a large dam. Her subsequent work further explores the themes of resource rights, subaltern resistance and cultural identity. She has edited Waterlines: The Penguin Book of River Writings (Penguin India), Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource (Permanent Black) and Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture and Power (Oxford University Press). She is currently writing about bourgeois environmentalism and spatial restructuring in the context of economic liberalization in Delhi. Amita Baviskar has taught at the University of Delhi, and has been a visiting professor at Stanford, Cornell and the University of California at Berkeley. She is co-editor of the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology. She was awarded the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for distinguished contributions to development studies.