Dr Rita Astuti

Rita Astuti is an expert in the anthropology of Madagascar. Her first period of extensive fieldwork among Vezo fishing people took place in the late 1980s, and focused on kinship, personhood, gender, and identity. Since then, she has revisited her ethnographic findings through a research project on how Vezo children and adults categorise the social world and how they conceptualise the distinction between "us" and "them." This work has been undertaken in close collaboration with leading developmental psychologists and has involved the use of experimental techniques in conjunction with more traditional anthropological methods. Dr Astuti has since been awarded an ESRC Research Fellowship (2002-2005), which has allowed her to continue her interdisciplinary research. She has spent a year at the Laboratory of Developmental Studies at Harvard University, and has undertaken further research in Madagascar on Vezo children's acquisition of religious concepts and on the development of the concepts of biological life and death.

Selected publications:

Forthcoming. Revealing and obscuring Rivers' natural pedigrees: Biological inheritance and kinship in Madagascar. In Genealogy beyond kinship: Sequence, transmission and essence in ethnography and social theory, James Leach and Sandra Bamford (eds). Oxford: Berghahn Books.

2007. What happens after death? In Questions of life and death, Rita Astuti, Jonathan Parry & Charles Stafford (eds.), London School of Economics Monographs, Oxford: Berg, pp. 227-247.

2007. Ancestors and the afterlife. In Religion, anthropology, and cognitive science, Harvey Whitehouse and James Laidlaw (eds). Chapel Hill: Carolina Academic, pp. 161-178.

2004. (with G.E.A. Solomon and S. Carey) Constraints on conceptual development: A case study of the acquisition of folkbiological and folksociological knowledge in Madagascar. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, no.277, vol. 69, no.3. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000472/

2001. Are we all natural dualists? A cognitive developmental approach. (The 2000 Malinowski Memorial Lecture) Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7: 429-447. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000471/

2000. Les gens ressemblent-ils aux poulets ? Penser la frontière homme / animal à Madagascar, Terrain, 34:.89-105 http://terrain.revues.org/document985.html

1998. "It's a boy!," "It's a girl!": Reflections on sex and gender in Madagascar and beyond. In Bodies and persons: Comparative perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, Michael Lambek and Andrew Strathern (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000498/

1995. People of the sea: Identity and descent among the Vezo of Madagascar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Some of these publications, and others as well, are available on-line via LSE Research.

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