Professor Charles Stafford

Charles Stafford is a specialist in the anthropology of China and Taiwan. His research has focused primarily on child development, learning, kinship, religion and economics. He is also interested in the relationship between anthropology and philosophy. Professor Stafford’s first major fieldwork project was conducted in the late 1980s in a Taiwanese fishing community where he examined the relationship between nationalist schooling and Taiwanese popular religion. In the early 1990s he began to conduct research in mainland China on issues related to kinship, religion, and Chinese historical consciousness. During this research, he became especially interested in rituals and practices of "separation and reunion," which help to structure the flow of social life in rural communities. More recently, Professor Stafford has conducted fieldwork, funded by the ESRC, on learning and economic life in rural China and Taiwan. He is currently developing a collaborative research project with colleagues at Nanjing University which will focus on economic life from a cognitive anthropological perspective.

Selected publications:

2008. What is interesting about Chinese religion. In Learning religion, R. Sarro and D. Berliner (eds.) Oxford: Berghahn

2007. (editor, with R. Astuti & J. Parry) Questions of Anthropology. Oxford: Berg

2004. (editor) Learning and economic agency in China and Taiwan. Special issue of Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, 2(1).

2003. (editor) Living with separation in modern China. London: Routledge Curzon.

2000. Separation and reunion in modern China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1995. The roads of Chinese childhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Professor Stafford's fieldwork photos can be viewed through the LSE Library Archives catalogue here.

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