Thursday, 8 October 2026 5pm, followed by a drinks reception
Old Anthropology Library, Houghton Street, WC2A 2AE

Please register your attendance here. 

Numbers are a crucial mediator of how we perceive and understand the world. Increasingly it is humans themselves who are the subject of quantification. But what does it do to us to be on the receiving end of such measurement?

In Marked: School Grades and the Quantified Life, Noëlle Rohde undertakes in-depth fieldwork in a German school where students receive more than one hundred grades per year. The result is a nuanced account of the effects of grades on students, and a cautionary tale of the increasing quantification of human life. 

Speakers:
Andrea Mennicken (she/her), Professor of Management and Organisation at Kings College
Cris Shore (he/him), Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths 

Endorsements:
"Metrics are powerful instruments that shape people’s life chances. Noëlle Rohde examines how grading practices in schools produce categories of “good” and “bad” students while instilling particular notions of worth and performance. She invites us to reflect critically on the very idea of rendering everything measurable and objectifiable. Her book offers a rich and compellingly argued account of the problems and pitfalls associated with the megatrend of quantification."— Steffen Mau, Professor of Sociology, Humboldt University of Berlin, and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science, Göttingen

“Rohde’s careful anthropology of German grading practices reveals the impact of the grade currency by which young people are evaluated, sorted, and judged. While many societies are trying to make assessment more human and humane, Noëlle reveals the inhumane side of reducing learning to grades. Her expose makes clear we can choose something else if we care about young people.”— Gavin T. L. Brown, Professor of Educational Assessment, The University of Auckland

“Rohde’s is a fascinating account of one of the world’s most prevalent and fateful quantitative practices: grading students. In rich ethnographic detail, and with a rare focus on grades as they are experienced by students, she examines how deeply grades mediate students’ sense of self, their futures, and the meanings of merit. In doing so, she makes an important contribution to the literature on quantification.”— Wendy Espeland, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Northwestern University

"Quantification shapes our lives ever more deeply and dangerously. Noëlle Rohde brilliantly shows how through the eyes of some of the most quantified people in the world – school children. Exceptionally acute and warm-hearted, this book engages with a lived experience shared by us all and in so doing breaks new ground in urgent debates over the ethics of quantification today."— Morgan Clarke, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford

"As we quantify ever more aspects of our lives, this richly ethnographic study of a German comprehensive school exposes how students internalise the social judgements and psychological harms produced through incessant grading. Humane, empathetic and theoretically ambitious, Marked makes an important contribution to our understanding of schools as powerful incubators of meritocratic subjectivities."— David Mills, Associate Professor in Pedagogy and the Social Sciences, University of Oxford

"How to interpret the nearly universal experience of being quantified? In this meticulous ethnography of numerical measurement, Noëlle Rohde ventures into the most formative (and often trauma-inducing) site of quantification: a secondary school where students face constant assessments of their performance. The result is a wonderfully illuminating account of the social and psychological effects of a relentlessly graded life"— Javier Lezaun, Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS), University of Oxford

8am-8pm
6th Floor LSE Old Building
LSE Anthropologist Nick Long spent 18 months living and working with hypnosis professionals - mainly in Indonesia, but also in Malaysia, the USA and the UK. They all said the same thing: that hypnotism has a lot to offer, but many people mistrust it because of its associations with mind control, vaudeville, and the supernatural. They wished more people understood what they actually did. 

In the spirit of that wish, this exhibtion presents ethnographic photographs that reflect the variety and complexity of what it is like to be a hypnotist. It has a particular focus on Indonesian hypnotism, foregrounding the experiences of therapists from the Global South. 

Friday, 12 June at 5pm
Old Anthropolog Library, Old Building, Houghton Street

The Climate Trial: Law and Justice on a Melting Planet

Date: 18 May 2026, 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm 

Venue: London School of Economics and Political Science - Wolfson Theatre, Cheng Kin Ku Building, WC2A 3LJ

Hosted in collaboration with the LSE Department of Anthropology, the Global School of Sustainability and ASA Climate Anthropology Network

In May 2025, a German court ruled for the first time anywhere in the world that major corporate emitters can in principle be held liable for their contribution to climate change harms. The case — Lliuya v. RWE — made headlines globally. But the full story of how this landmark lawsuit was built over a decade has never been told.

Join us for the launch of The Climate Trial, a new book by Noah Walker-Crawford that provides the first inside account of one of the most significant climate lawsuits ever brought. Walker-Crawford helped initiate the case in 2014, served as interpreter and scientific adviser to the plaintiff’s legal team, and went on to study the lawsuit as an anthropologist. The result is a book that moves between German courtrooms, UN climate summits, and melting glaciers in the Peruvian Andes, revealing what climate justice looks like in practice: the legal strategy, the science, the corporate response, and the deeply personal motivations of a Peruvian farmer who stayed the course for a decade because he felt the mountains were suffering.

The event will open with introductory remarks from Dr Mareike Winchell (LSE Department of Anthropology), followed by a video message from Saúl Luciano Lliuya, the plaintiff in the case, and a presentation from the author. A panel of respondents will then explore the book’s themes from the perspectives of law, climate science, and anthropology, followed by an open discussion with the audience.

The panel brings together people with direct connections to the book’s subject matter: Roda Verheyen, the lawyer who represented Luciano Lliuya throughout the case; Friederike Otto, whose field of climate change attribution science was at the centre of the evidentiary arguments in the courtroom; and Hannah Knox, whose anthropological work on climate and environmental governance speaks directly to the book’s analysis. The discussion will be chaired by Joana Setzer, a leading researcher on climate litigation.

Following the discussion, guests are welcome to join a reception where they can collect copies of the book and have them signed by the author.

17:00 - 18:00, Friday 15 May 2026
Old Anthropology Library

Following the publication of Teodor Zidaru’s book, Speaking of Trust: Religion and Mutual Aid in Southwest Kenya, join us for a panel discussion with Teodor Zidaru (St Andrews), Katherine Ajibade (LSE), Max Bolt (Oxford), Sohini Kar (LSE), chaired by Deborah James (LSE).

Book information: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/speaking-of-trust-9781350301115/ 

9.00am-5.30pm, 30 April and 1 May 2026

Room 2.10, Marshall Building, LSE.

Since the 1970s, animal ethics has emerged as both a central academic concern and a pressing public issue. While philosophy has offered foundational theoretical frameworks since Animal Liberation (Singer & Harari 2023), anthropology’s “multispecies turn” (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010) and its engagement with the “ethical turn” (Laidlaw 2002) have introduced new empirical approaches to human-animal ethics. Yet, direct dialogue between philosophy and anthropology on these issues remains limited.   

This workshop builds on the growing strengths in animal ethics research at LSE—particularly within the Philosophy Department’s Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience and the Anthropology Department’s ongoing work on ethics and human-animal relations. Supported by Professor Catherine Allerton, it seeks to bring established philosophers and anthropologists into conversation with early career scholars, creating a platform for shared inquiry, debate, and future collaboration.   

The workshop will feature keynote dialogues and paper presentations. Our aim is to foster an ongoing network of collaborators and to explore the possibility of a special issue or collected volume in an interdisciplinary animal studies journal.   

Sponsor: Anthropology Department, LSE 
Co-Sponsor: Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience, LSE 

Keynote dialogues 

• Jonathan Birch (LSE) & Webb Keane (Michigan): Negotiating Universality and Diversity in Animal Ethics 
• Angie Pepper (Roehampton) & Samantha Hurn (Exeter): Methods and Ethics of knowing Animals 
• Clare A. Palmer (Texas A&M) & Garry Marvin (Roehampton): Assistance and Killing: Ethics with Wild Animals 
• Sechin Y. S. Chien (Academia Sinica) & Naisargi N. Davé (Toronto): The Ethics of Companion Animal Rescue 
• Mark J. Rowlands (Miami) & Adam Reed (St Andrews): Animals' Ethical Agency and Patiency 

Paper presentations 

• Cristina Douglas (Edinburgh): Follow the Dog: More-than-Human Ethics in Dementia Care through Animal-Assisted Therapy 
• Erin McConkey (Hawai’i): Ouroboric Ethics: Interspecies Injury and Exploitation within Lifesaving Antivenom  
• Gabriella Santini (UCL): On Doing Research with Animals: Curiosity, Agency, and the Ethics of Asking the Right Questions  
• Hazel McArthur (Edinburgh): When Care Hurts: The Ethical Tensions of Affective Human–Animal Relations 
• Imogen Suett (Uni of Law): Does the Ecofeminist Strengthen or Weaken their Role as an Advocate for the Liberation of Oppression by Intersecting with the Animal Rights Movement?  
• Katariina Hynninen (LSE): Aesthetic Experience and Animal Dignity  
• Kathy Harrison (LSE): Animals as Agents in the Animal rights Movement in Contemporary China  
• Kunbzang Tsering (Bonn): Sinful or not? 'Slaughter Renunciation' Movement and Its Reaction in Tibet  
• Mathilde Tahar-Malaussena (UCL): Enlarging the Concept of Animal Agency: Inventing with Non-humans  
• Xiaohong Wu (Exeter): Between Divine Instruments and Instrumentalized Divinities: Rethinking Animal Roles in Daoist Practice through a Multispecies Ethnography Perspective  
• Yufei Zhou (LSE): Ethical Objectification: How Pastoralists and Enthusiasts Relate to Tibetan Mastiffs in Contemporary China 

References:  

Kirksey, S. E. & S. Helmreich 2010. The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25, 545–576. 

Laidlaw, J. 2002. For An Anthropology Of Ethics And Freedom. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, 311–332. 

Singer, P. & Y. N. Harari 2023. Animal liberation now: the definitive classic renewed. New York: Harper Perennial.  

Poster designer: Dawa Dorje  

Complexity and Complicity in Social Anthropology
Thursday 5 March 2026 6.00pm to 7.00pm
Old Theatre, Old Building, Houghton Street

We often call societies with cities, literacy, and governments, “complex,” and small-scale societies “simple.” But in reality, everyday life in small societies is highly complex—people must constantly negotiate relationships, care, and conflict without many rules or tools to guide them. By contrast, in large societies, social roles, technologies, and hierarchies simplify routine interactions. To understand the challenges of social entanglements in non-state environments, and the uniformity and monotony of capitalist states, I propose two concepts: complicity and commensuration. Creating complicity (implicit understandings shared by few) increases social complexity; whereas commensuration (comparison by unit and scale) enables social simplicity. Both processes are tied into each other, and to appreciate the complexity of doing things together, we must attend to emergent simplicity. 

Monday 19 January 2026 10am to Friday 20 February 2026 - 8pm
Atrium Gallery, LSE Old Building

Sensing energy transition is an exhibition that explores how people experience the sounds, textures, and atmospheres of energy transition. The exhibition showcases work from Living with Energy Transition, a collaborative project focused on a series of public soundwalks by artist Maja Zećo.

The soundwalks focused on St. Fittick’s Park in Torry, Aberdeen – a site partially earmarked for development as an energy transition zone. Sound walking is a practice of listening while walking. Each walk was an artwork involving careful attention to the park and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Participants followed specific routes that drew attention to the diverse sounds emanating from different features around the park and travelling across it.

Energy transition is often presented as a pathway to a sustainable future. The soundwalks uncovered a more complicated story – one where the promise of economic opportunity goes hand in hand with a reordering of environments, ways of knowing, and practices of care and belonging. Sensing energy transition explores how this unsettling of lived experience is sensed in different ways. It comprises a new body of artistic work informed by the soundwalks, alongside ephemera and photographic documentation. These works are not simply documentation but reflecting multiple experiences of listening to St Fittick's Park, thus revealing new perspectives on energy transition as an uneven, contested and lived process.

The exhibition has been realised, over the past two years, through a dialogue between anthropology and the arts. Through practice-based research, the team have developed ways of thinking, making, and creating knowledge that contribute to their respective fields as well as engage with sound beyond established disciplinary frames.

More about the exhibition

6th February 2026, 5.30-7.30pm
Auditorium, Lower Ground floor, Centre Building, Houghton Street

Rosemary Firth (1912-2001) was a social anthropologist, lecturer at the University of London Institute of Education, and wife of Raymond Firth. Her notes, diaries, and correspondences have been edited by their son, Hugh Firth, and Loulou Brown, the daughter of Edmund Leach, who figures prominently in the letters. The book Love, Loyalty, and Deceit is about Rosemary’s life in the shadow of Raymond Firth and Edmund Leach: two crucial figures in the history of the discipline. It provides a window onto the making of social anthropology after WWII, and how our academic ancestors handled the contradictions between scholarly work and family life. At its centre are the relations between celebrated male academics and the often-unacknowledged labour of women as partners, collaborators, and scholars in their own right. Rosemary Firth’s letters show how intimacy, duty, and care shaped careers and institutions. With authors Loulou Brown and Hugh Firth, panellists Jonathan Spencer and Janet Carsten, and chaired by Hans Steinmüller, we will explore what this book means to anthropologists today. 

Loulou Brown is the daughter of Edmund Leach. She is a freelance editor who works on dissertations and theses in the humanities and social sciences.   

Hugh Firth is the son of Rosemary and Raymond Firth. He has published on issues in clinical and organisational psychology, and on homicide in early medieval Iceland. He continues to teach on organisational relationships, threat, conflict and power. 

Janet Carsten is Emeritus Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on the anthropology of kinship, marriage, and relatedness. She has carried out long-term research in Malaysia since the early 1980s. Her most recent book, Marriage and the Moral Imagination, is published in January 2026. 

Jonathan Spencer is Emeritus Professor of South Asian, Language, Culture and Society at the University of Edinburgh. He works on the history and politics of Sri Lanka and has also published on the institutional history of British Social Anthropology. 

Hans Steinmüller is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, LSE. Based on fieldwork in China and Myanmar, he writes about ritual, kinship, sovereignty and complexity.   

For more information about the book, see https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/FirthLove 

Hosted by The Royal Anthropological Institute and LSE Department of Anthropology

Friday, 5 December 2025
6-7pm
In-person public event (The Sheikh Zayed Theatre) 

Professor Deborah James (LSE Anthropology), Dr Miranda Sheild Johansson (UCL), Dr Johanna Mugler (Bern University) and Dr Robin Smith (independent researcher, and an anthropologist of post-socialist Europe)

Thursday, 13 November 2025
6.30-8pm

Watch the recording

In this panel discussion, anthropologists working on redistribution and tax will present the findings of—and interrogate each other on—two recent books: Clawing Back: redistribution in precarious times, and Anthropology and Tax: ethnographies of fiscal relations.

Anthropologists view redistribution in unusual ways. In exploring how people pay for what they need and want, we consider how allocative processes operate beyond those tried and tested in the heyday of the welfare state. Typically, incomes are earned through wage work, or people revert to benefits. Yet austerity has reduced welfare systems in the North, while those in the South are under-developed. To make ends meet, people use both ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ resources, payments and economic relationships, creating larger networks of redistribution. They seek new ways to supplement meagre incomes, combining work, welfare and debt. But, as Deborah James shows, combining these three income sources is not straightforward: it requires canny intervention by local advisers on the one hand and householders on the other. Meanwhile, contributions, tributes and tithes, as shown by Miranda Sheild Johansson, Robin Mugler and Robin Smith, enable taxation beyond the exchequer. Their focus on fiscal systems looks at how the sharing, extraction, and flow of resources not only produce economic realities but also shape relations of belonging, dependence, and exclusion, as well as social and philosophical categories regarding work, and value.

Citizens as cultivars: democratic values in paddy fields and universities

Wednesday 05 March 2025 6.30pm to 7.30pm
Old Theatre, Old Building, Houghton Street
Online and in-person

Watch the YouTube video

Listen to the podcast

A cultivar is a plant that people have selected for desired traits and which retains those when propagated. This lecture draws on long-term fieldwork among paddy farmers in Bengal to explore the ways in which cultivation - of crops, neighbourly relations, and selves - can help democracy and truthful politics to flourish. 

It also considers how the university, through its own cultivation of knowledge and debate, is another vital site for nurturing active citizens and a better future.

Law at Interregnum: Stories of China, Law, and Development

Matthew Erie - The University of Oxford

21 May 2025 @ 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm | Moot Court Room, LSE Law School 

In a quote attributed to Gramsci, the imprisoned critic allegedly wrote, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Along these lines and despite its propagandistic attributes, the Chinese political slogan 东升西降 (“The East is rising, and the West is declining”) may have some descriptive value. What is the role of law at interregnum, the period between political orders? Law in the Anglo-American tradition is traditionally thought of as, minimally, providing rules for transactional security and predictability, and, more thickly, offering a moral empire in Dworkin’s sense. Interregnum shows the moral center sliding away leaving thin transactionalism. This is most clearly seen at the intersection of the Trumpian assault on the US legal system and the global ascent of China as an alternative praxis of law. Whereas categories such as “liberal law” and “authoritarian law” purport to describe discreet and opposing categories, interregnum suggests the speciousness of such labels whereby the political tramples upon law almost everywhere. Yet rather than the pure domination of politics, interregnum reveals the following: first, the flex of law as it is bent and reshaped, the stickiness of American-capitalistic and other imperial forms of law, and the porousness of law in its relation to the extra-legal and non-legal. This paper provides a sketch of an ethnography of law at interregnum with a particular emphasis on what may come next. It draws on ethnographic research conducted over the last six years as part of the “China, Law and Development” project which explores how diverse Chinese actors are affecting transnational law and the internal orders of non-PRC jurisdictions predominantly among developing economies.Speaker: Matthew Erie is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies in the Oriental Institute, and Associate Research Fellow of the Socio-Legal Studies Centre at the University of Oxford.

Please note that the paper for this seminar will be pre-circulated. To request a copy, please contact: J.A.Bomhoff@lse.ac.uk or Y.Doughan@lse.ac.uk

This seminar will be open to participants on a first-come, first-served basis.

Friday 28th February 2025
1pm - 2:30pm
LSE Old Anthropology Library, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE

Some of the most widespread and accessible Sanskrit texts are the hymns of praise (stotras) published in countless anthologies and booklets, inscribed on temple walls, and recited in personal and public worship all over the world. This talk considers the challenges and opportunities in analyzing such hymns as examples of Hindu prayer. It focuses on the publishing history of devotional anthologies of Hindu hymns over the past 200 years to argue for the pivotal role such popular prayers have played in the history of Hinduism. 

Guest speaker: Dr Hamsa Stainton, Associate Professor, School of Religious Studies, McGill University

Respondent: Professor Sondra Hausner, Professor of Anthropology of Religion Oxford University

Open to all LSE staff and students. Please email a.gheewala-lohiya@lse.ac.uk if you’d like to attend and/or bring guests

Author Denis Hirson discusses his new memoir, My Thirty-Minute Bar Mitzvah (Pushkin Press) with Fiammetta Rocco, administrator of the International Booker Prize. The book recounts a highly unusual thirteenth birthday in the Johannesburg of the mid-1960s, at the height of apartheid. It raises awkward questions, says critic David Atwell, about the genre of political memoir in South Africa, suggesting that perhaps the overdue emotional reckoning for the personal consequences of lives lived primarily in the Struggle comes not from the children of the heroes, but from their children, the third generation.

When: Thursday 28th November 2024, 7.00pm
Where: Old Anthropology Library, 6th Floor, Old Building, Houghton Street, LSE, WC2A 2AE.

Chair: Deborah James 

For more information about the book, click here.

Nafay Choudhury: ‘Bazaar Governance: Legal Pluralism and Economic Order in an Afghan Marketplace’ 

3 December 2024 @ 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
Moot Court Room, 7th Floor, CKK Building

We are delighted to present the first event in the new LSE Law and Anthropology Seminar Series, supported jointly by the Law School and the Anthropology Department.

Our inaugural speaker will be Dr. Nafay Choudhury, Assistant Professor of Law at the LSE, on the topic of ‘Bazaar Governance: Legal Pluralism and Economic Order in an Afghan Marketplace’. All interested LSE staff and students are very welcome to attend. Capacity is limited, and the event operates on a first come basis.

Topic:

Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Afghanistan, this presentation explores the maintenance of order within Afghanistan’s central money exchanger bazaar, Sarai Shahzada. The bazaar plays a central role in the running of the country’s entire economy despite operating with a high degree of autonomy from the state. The presentation explores the various governance practices within the bazaar, which bring together overlapping and interpenetrating elements of state law, non-state law and extra-legal arrangements based on based on trust. I employ the term entangled governance to capture the convergence of these different forms of ordering. Entangled governance turns attention to the hybrid assemblage of diverse logics and rationalities employed by individuals that contributes to the overall maintenance of order. It highlights the messy, inconsistent and contingent nature of order within a social setting. Ethnographic insights help to provide a granular account of the “organized chaos” or “patterned contingency” that characterizes the continued success of the bazaar.

Speaker:

Dr. Nafay Choudhury joined the LSE in 2023 and is Assistant Professor of Law (Socio-Legal Studies). His work sits at the intersection of socio-legal studies, legal pluralism, economic development, private law, and the rule of law. He studies the fragmented and plural forms of order that exist within the state, alongside the state, and beyond the state. His current research looks at the role of market associations in providing normative order in fragile settings. His book manuscript (under contract with Cambridge University Press) examines non-state legal ordering through an ethnographic study of Afghanistan’s money exchangers.

Wednesday, 11 December 2024
5.15pm-7pm
Old Anthropology Library (OLD.6.05)

Join us for a thought-provoking double book launch, "Sustaining the Unsustainable?" Authors Andrea Pia and Tim McLellan will delve into their recently published ethnographic monographs, exploring the complexities of science, bureaucracy, and theories of social and environmental change in southwest China. Their work offers a unique perspective on environmental sustainability, shedding light on the challenges and opportunities in this region. Accompanying them, PhD students Cla Ruzol and Tongyue Zhu will engage in critical dialogue, further enriching the discussion. This event promises to be a stimulating exploration of sustainability, bureaucracy, and the human impact on the environment.

This booklaunch celebrates the publication of a book discussing the legacy and present-day ramifications of Malinowski’s classic work, a century later. Argonauts of the Western Pacific marked a new dawn for anthropological inquiry, and established the grounds for a new subdiscipline: economic anthropology. Our contributors re-examine its legacy, re-exploring its ethnographic foundations, taking a new look at the Kula in the present day but also looking far beyond: at South Africa, Brazil, Argentina and China. They ask provocative questions about the nature of economy, work, circulation, and money. 

When: Thursday 14th November 2024, 5.30pm
Where: Old Anthropology Library (OLD 6.15), LSE 

RSVP: anthropology.enquiries@lse.ac.uk 

For more information, click here.

Hosted by the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and the Department of Anthropology 

Wednesday 09 October 2024 11.30am to 1.00pm

Professor Michael Herzfeld (Harvard University) will discuss the status of Thailand as an example of “crypto-colonialism” – a phenomenon in which declarations of independence and of high civilization conceal elite arrangements with colonial powers whereby the alleged freedom turns out to be highly conditional, and in which the colonial powers’ “civilizational discourse” reproduces locally the humiliation of the nation-state by the colonial powers. Using examples drawn from ethnographic as well as historical sources, Herzfeld will also place Thailand’s current dilemmas in a global context, with specific reference to the political evolution of Greece and Nepal. 

More information on registering online and in person can be found here.

Workshop

12–13th June 2024
Old Anthropology Library,
6th Floor, Old Building LSE

Participants include: Srimati Basu, Rimple Mehta, Perveez Mody, Megnaa Mehtta, Kaveri Qureshi, Asha Abeyasekera, Henrike Donner, Katy Gardner, Naseem Jivraj, Charlotte Ramble. All welcome!

For more information, please email Ishani at I.L.Milward-Bose@lse.ac.uk

Join Neger Elodie Behzadi, Katy Gardner, Onya McCausland, Stephanie Postar, Han Smith and Gisa Weszkalnys for a panel discussion to launch 'Extraction Exclusion: Beyond Binaries of Exclusion and Inclusion in Natural Resources Extraction'.

May the 7th 2024, 5:30-7:00pm
Old Anthropology Library, LSE 

Departments of Anthropology and International Development, LSE

Autumn Term 2023
Wednesdays, 5 – 6.30pm
St Clements S 419, plus zoom.

Join Zoom Meeting https://lse.zoom.us/j/85438047161?pwd=bVZ1RDRRNVF2NlBrQzNPVldpaExrUT09

Meeting ID: 854 3804 7161
Passcode: 067807

Week 9: 22nd November
Skilling race: Affective labor and “white” pedagogies in the Chilean service economy
Sofia Ugarte, Anthropology, LSE

Week 10: 29th November
Family, Private Property and the Aloha State: Sea level rise and family legacies in Hawai’i
Sylvia Yanagisako, Stanford and Anthropology, LSE [venue to be confirmed]

Week 11: 6th December
‘They don’t even want to do business’: exploring women’s advicescapes in Bangladesh
Becky Bowers, Anthropology and International Development, LSE

Contact: Deborah James - d.a.james@lse.ac.uk.

Anthropologist and Imperialist H. H. Risley and British India, 1873-1911

Wednesday 25th October, 6 to 8pm

Free and open to all at The Royal Asiatic Society
14 Stephenson Way, NW1 2HD
Because of the HS2 building site, access to the RAS in Stephenson Way is only possible via North Gower Street, not via Melton Street and Euston Street.

Chris Fuller carried out extensive ethnographic research in India between 1971 and 2008, and published several books, including The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India (1992; rev. ed. 2004), The Renewal of the Priesthood: Modernity and Traditionalism in a South Indian Temple (2003) and, with Haripriya Narasimhan, Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste (2014).

8 December 2022
5-7pm

A feature documentary film 
2020, 77 min.
Czech Republic, Switzerland, Jordan 

The film, which emerged from a year of doctoral ethnographic fieldwork, explores the clash between the state of Jordan, agricultural businesses and Wadi Rum indigenous communities over the last abundant source of drinking water. The screening will be followed by a Q&A and discussion with the film’s researcher, director and editor, visual anthropologist Pavel Borecký.  

Watch the film trailer here. See the film’s website here.  

This panel discussion will launch Alice Tilche's book Adivasi Art and Activism: Curation in a Nationalist Age (U of Washington Press, 2022)

The Critical South Asia Group (CSAG) and the Warwick Interdisciplinary Centre for International Development (WICID), along with the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) invite you to a book launch and panel discussion on

Thursday, 19 May 2022
2 pm - 3:30 pm UK time
on ZOOM

Monday 06 June 2022 1:00pm to 2:30pm

Hosted by the Department of Anthropology and the International Inequalities Institute

Against the backdrop of a rising Hindu majoritarianism and marked social and economic inequality, what does it mean to be a Muslim woman in India today?

This event marks the launch of Lexi Stadlen’s newly published Nine Paths which explores the intimate lives of nine women and their families on an island in the Sunderban, at the eastern edge of India, over the course of a year. There are weddings to celebrate and deaths to mourn, families to care for, difficult marriages to navigate and tragedies to overcome, as we observe the everyday drudgery, unexpected turmoil and the dreams of something better. A conversation chaired by Alpa Shah with Lexi Stadlen, sociologist Patricia Jeffrey who has conducted four decades of research in a Muslim village in Uttar Pradesh and journalist Sonia Faleiro who most recently wrote the The Good Girls, the ordinary killing of two low caste girls in a village in Uttar Pradesh.

Meet our speakers and chair

Sonia Faleiro (@soniafaleiro) is an award winning journalist and writer. She is the author, most recently, of Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing, praised by the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, New York Times and Financial Times.

Patricia Jeffrey, the author of many books and articles on India, is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at University of Edinburgh and is finalising a manuscript on the transitions of ordinary life in a Muslim village in Uttar Pradesh over more than forty years.

Lexi Stadlen has a PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and won the 2019 Bayly Prize, awarded by the Royal Asiatic Society for an outstanding thesis on an Asian topic completed at a British University. 

Alpa Shah (@alpashah001) is the author of Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas, a finalist for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, the New India Book Foundation Prize and winner of the 2020 Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize. She is Professor of Anthropology and Convenor of the ‘Global Economies of Care’ research theme at the International Inequalities Institute, LSE

Discussants:

Veena Das, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

Thomas Hansen, Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Anthropology, Stanford university

Chair:
Deborah James, Professor of Anthropology, LSE

Cultivating Democracy is the first study of the world’s largest democracy that shows how the values of republicanism are essential for successful democratic practice. The discussion of Indian politics in this book attends to both its institutional form and its democratic culture and shows how the project of democracy is incomplete unless it is also accompanied by a continual cultivation of active citizenship of republicanism.

This is an anthropological study in one particular rural setting in India, studied from 1998 to 2013. It draws on deep ethnographic engagement with the people and social life in two villages, both during elections and in the time in between them, to show how these two temporalities connect. The analysis shows how an agrarian village society produces the social imaginaries required for democratic and republican values. The ethnographic microscope on a single paddy growing setting allows us to examine how the various social institutions of kinship, economy, and religion are critical sites for the continual civic cultivation of cooperation, vigilance, redistribution, inviolate commitment, and hope—values that are essential for democracy.
Watch the recording on YouTube

Thursday 7 October 2021, 2-3.30pm

Hosted by Department of International Development and Department of Anthropology

Anthropology has often been seen as an academic version of Indiana Jones - namely a discipline devoted to exotic travel that does not have much relevance for the modern world.

However, Gillian Tett argues that this image is completely wrong today, and anthropology can make a vital contribution to public policy, corporate and financial life, as well as our communities as we try to 'build back better' after COVID-19. Indeed, she argues that a world drowning in artificial intelligence and other digital innovations desperately needs a second type of 'AI' - Anthropology Intelligence - to enable us to flourish.

But what does this mean for the economics profession? Could economists benefit by embracing this new type of AI? Gillian Tett will debate this with Deborah Rowland. 

Wednesday 13 October 2021 6:00pm to 7:30pm

Hosted by the Department of Anthropology and International Inequalities Institute

Join us for this event in which David Wengrow will be in conversation with Alpa Shah about his new book co-authored with the late David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

A new science of history, it overturns our ideas of social evolution, and reveals new possibilities for human emancipation. Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, Graeber and Wengrow question our fundamental assumptions about the origins of inequality, showing how history contains many more hopeful moments than we’ve been led to believe, once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there.

David Graeber's parting gift, this is his last book which he completed just before he died. We honour David Graeber in this event.

You can order the book, The Dawn of Everything, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.

Meet our speakers and chair

Alpa Shah (@alpashah001) is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

David Wengrow (@davidwengrow) is Professor of Comparative Archaeology at UCL, and author of What Makes Civilisation? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the World. Photo credit - Antonio Olmos. 

Francisco Ferreira (@fhgferreira) is the Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director of the International Inequalities Institute at LSE.

David Graeber Memorial lecture is co-presented by the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics; École d'innovation sociale Élisabeth Bruyère, St Paul; Zanîngeha, Rojova; Institute de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla; Anthropology and Social Change, California Institute of Integral Studies. 

2nd David Graeber Memorial Lecture 2022 
5 April, 2pm Eastern Time.

Professor Michael Hardt
Professor of Literature, Duke University

‘Three experiments in dual organization in the 1970s: The Black Panther Party, Autonomia, and Devrimci Yol’ 

1st David Graeber Memorial Lecture 2021
11 May 

Professor Alpa Shah 
Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics 

‘What if We Selected our Leaders by Lottery? Democracy by Sortition, Liberal Elections and Communist Revolutionaries’ 

Watch the lecture here:
Watch the YouTube video

Abstract: What if we selected our leaders by lottery? Zooming out from the mud huts of indigenous communities in the forested hills of eastern India, this article compares three different models of leadership and democracy: liberal electoral democracy; Marxist-Leninist Maoist democracy; and democracy by sortition — the random selection of rotating leaders. The significance of sortition is introduced into discussions of democracy in India (showing connections with practices in Nepal and China) as part of a broader attempt to make scholarship on South Asia more democratic. The author also re-reads ideals of leadership among indigenous people, showing that we need a theoretical and practical vision arguing not for societies without leaders but for societies in which everyone may be a leader. In India, this compels us to push back against the critique of its indigenous communities for not producing leaders and enables a profound re-reading of the history of subaltern anti-colonial rebellions. The final aim of the article is to highlight the virtues of the potential of sortition in creating democratic society globally. How we think about democracy and leadership is thus turned on its head to provide a new vision for the future. 

Dr Shah’s David Graeber Memorial lecture was published by the journal Development and Change. 

To pay tribute to David Graeber we began with the launch of his post-humously published book with David Wengrow, the Dawn of Everything. We also devoted a series of the Department’s flagship Friday Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory to discussing David Graeber’s work. Chaired by Alpa Shah, these events strived to come to terms with our dear colleague and friend’s extraordinary intellectual generosity and optimism. In each session, two anthropologists lead a critical discussion on one of David Graeber’s key gifts of writing, exploring the fissures and cracks, as David liked to, in order to grow our thoughts and actions. The series was also published by the journal Focaal. 

Dawn of Everything
David Wengrow (Professor of Archaeology, UCL) in conversation with Alpa Shah (Professor of Anthropology, LSE) about his newly published book with the late David Graeber
Watch the video on YouTube

Lost People
Maurice Bloch (LSE Emeritus Prof Anthropology) and Jonathan Parry (LSE Emeritus Prof Anthropology) 
Watch the video on YouTube

Value
Chris Gregory (Australian National University Emeritus Prof Anthropology) and Don Kalb (Bergen Prof Anthropology)
Watch the video on YouTube

Debt
Keith Hart (Goldsmiths Anthropology Emeritus Prof Anthropology) and Maka Suarez (Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies Fellow) 
Watch the video on YouTube

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology 
Keir Martin (Oslo Assoc Prof Anthropology) and Ayça Çubukçu (LSE Assoc Prof LSE Sociology) 
Watch the video on YouTube

Myth
Megan Laws (LSE Fellow Anthropology) - Giulio Ongaro (LSE Postdoc Anthropology) and Michael Edwards (Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge) 
Watch the video on YouTube

Bureaucracy 
Nayanika Mathur (Oxford Assoc Professor Anthropology) and Michael Herzfeld (Harvard Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences)
CANCELLED due to strike action  

Bullshit Jobs 
Mao Mollona (Goldsmiths Senior Lecturer Anthropology) and Andrew Sanchez (Cambridge Associate Professor Anthropology)
Watch the video on YouTube

Thursday 05 March 2020 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Hosted by LSE Festival: Shape the World

How do specific secular and religious ideologies – such as nationalism, neoliberalism, evangelical Christianity, Tablighi Islam – gain popularity and when do they lose traction?

This round table takes as its starting point a recent monograph by LSE anthropologist Mathijs Pelkmans – Fragile Conviction: Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan. Ethnographically rooted in the everyday life of a former mining town, the book explores how residents have dealt with the existential and epistemic crises that arose after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Observing that ideological commitment was often intense but rarely long-lasting, Fragile Conviction introduces the concept of pulsation to develop a novel temporal and relational theory of belief, which draws attention to the fact that ideas do not necessarily have a stable presence, but require boosts of energy to gain and retain their force. This dynamic is particularly evident in contexts of uncertainty, such as in Kyrgyzstan’s tumultuous trajectory following the collapse of the USSR. Invited speakers Catherine Alexander and Chris Hann will discuss the broader relevance of these findings and compare them with other settings in Central Asia. As such, the speakers will engage in a conversation about the role of belief, commitment, and doubt in the shaping of the (post-Soviet) world.