The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Editors

Editors-in-Chief

Hilary Callan is director emerita of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, having served as director from 2000 to 2010. She has held academic positions in anthropology and international education in the United Kingdom, the Middle East, Canada, and the Netherlands. Among other publications, she contributed to and is a coeditor of Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology (2017), Introductory Readings in Anthropology (2013), and Early Human Kinship: From Sex to Social Reproduction (Wiley Blackwell, 2008).

Simon Coleman (from 2019) is Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is a former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a current coeditor of Religion and Society: Advances in Research. His research interests include Pentecostalism, pilgrimage, Anglicanism, cathedrals, and religion in urban contexts. His books include The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism (coedited with Rosalind Hackett, 2015) and The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity (2000).

Associate Editors

Carolyn Brewer as a mature-aged student (after marriage and mothering) received her PhD from Murdoch University, Australia. Her research work focused on the impact of religion in the construction of gender and sexuality. Among other publications, her most important work is Shamanism, Catholicism and Gender Relations in Colonial Philippines 1521–1685 (2004). Since 1998 she has edited the electronic journal Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific. Now, in semiretirement and living back in Christchurch, she is a research associate at the Australian National University and edits manuscripts in preparation for publication.

Morgan Clarke (to 2018) is associate professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. His research centers on Islam in the contemporary Middle East and anthropological themes of kinship, law, and ethics. He is the author of Islam and Law in Lebanon: Sharia Within and Without the State (forthcoming) and Islam and New Kinship: Reproductive Technology and the Shariah in Lebanon (2009).

Emma Cohen (to 2018) is associate professor at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, and fellow in human sciences at Wadham College. Her current primary research investigates links between collective movement, exercise and wellbeing, and social bonding and cooperation in adults and children. She has also researched and published widely on topics at the intersection of evolution, psychology, and culture, including cultural transmission, religion and cooperation, and biases in social perception and preferences. Her recent publications include articles in the journals Evolution & Human Behavior, Frontiers in Psychology, and Religion, Brain & Behavior.

James Cole (from 2020) is a Principal Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Brighton, United Kingdom. His research is located within the broad subject of Human Evolution, specialising in understanding where the origin of symbolic behaviour and language may occur within hominin evolution and if such abilities are present across a range of human species. He is also interested in what cognitive, behavioural and social thresholds are needed by hominins in order to allow them to successfully disperse across the globe and overcome any environmental constraints. He also researches how ancient hominins treated their dead, particularly how and why some of them seem to have practiced cannibalism, in order to gain greater insights to the lifeways and social structures of hominin societies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and has conducted Stone Age fieldwork in Europe and East Africa. He has published most recently an edited volume Landscapes of Human Evolution: Contributions in honour of John Gowlett and in the journals: Scientific Reports; Journal of Quaternary Science; and Quaternary Science Reviews and a number of edited book chapters.

Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is a former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a current coeditor of Religion and Society: Advances in Research. His research interests include Pentecostalism, pilgrimage, Anglicanism, cathedrals, and religion in urban contexts. His books include The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism (coedited with Rosalind Hackett, 2015) and The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity (2000).

Rupert Cox is Director of Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester. He has published on the Zen Arts, Cultures of Copying and Material Heritage in Japan, anthropology ‘Beyond Text’ and on the cultural and ecological politics of military aircraft noise. He is interested in intersections between art and science and anthropology and innovative forms of public engagement.

John Eade (from 2020) is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Roehampton, Visiting Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, and co-editor of the Routledge Studies in Religion, Travel and Tourism and the Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place. His research interests and publications focus on the anthropology of pilgrimage, global migration, urban ethnicity and identity politics. His publications include The Politics of Community (1989) and Placing London (2000), the single edited Living the Global City (1997) and the co-edited volumes Contesting the Sacred (1991), Reframing Pilgrimage (2004), International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies (2015), New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies (2017) and Pilgrimage and Political Economy (2018).

Roy Ellen (to 2019) is emeritus professor of anthropology and human ecology at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. His main areas of current interest are ethnobiological knowledge systems, cognitive anthropology, social system resilience, and interisland trade. He has conducted field research in archipelagic Southeast Asia over a period of forty-five years. His recent books include Understanding Cultural Transmission in Anthropology (edited with Stephen Lycett and Sarah Johns, 2013), Nuaulu Religious Practices: The Frequency and Reproduction of Rituals in a Moluccan Society (2012), and On the Edge of the Banda Zone: Past and Present in the Social Organization of a Moluccan Trading Network (2003). He was elected to a fellowship of the British Academy in 2003 and was president of the Royal Anthropological Institute between 2007 and 2011.

Luisa Enria is Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Her work applies approaches from medical and political anthropology to study how communities engage with, imagine and at times resist development and humanitarian interventions, with a particular focus on health emergencies. Her PhD was an ethnographic study of young people’s political mobilisation and violence in the aftermath of the civil war in Sierra Leone which is now published as a book: The Politics of Work in a Post-Conflict State: Youth, Labour and Violence in Sierra Leone. In 2015, during the West African Ebola epidemic, she worked social scientist in the Ebola vaccine trials, exploring participant engagement with the trial and the social significance of medical research in Kambia, Northern Sierra Leone.  In 2016 she took up a post as Lecturer at the University of Bath where she also held an ESRC fellowship looking at the impact of the militarisation of the Ebola response on young people’s political identities. Alongside this work she has collaborated on several projects on the political economy of emergency vaccine deployment, rumours in epidemics, assessing community engagement for vaccine campaigns in humanitarian settings and she has developed a training on citizen ethnography for Community Health Workers. At LSHTM she holds a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship titled: Crisis of Confidence: the Politics of Evidence and (Mis)Trust in Epidemic Preparedness and Response. The project looks at the possibilities and tensions of bringing together different disciplines and ways of knowing the world in epidemic preparedness and response.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen (from 2020) is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, where he has taught anthropology since 1988. His research interests include nationalism and ethnicity, globalisation and creolisation, climate change and contradictions of modernity. His books are widely translated and include Ethnicity and Nationalism (1993), Small Places, Large Issues (1995/2014), Engaging Anthropology (2006), Globalization: The Key Concepts (2006/2014), Fredrik Barth (2015), Overheating (2016) and Boomtown (2018).

Gregory Feldman (to 2018) teaches international studies at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is a political anthropologist interested in migration, globalization, ethics, security, the state, political action, technocracy, and neoliberalism. His geographical focus is Europe with an emphasis on its relations with countries in the Mediterranean Sea region. Dr. Feldman is currently conducting an ethnographic project titled “The ‘Gray Zone’: Ethics, Action, and Police Investigations in the Mediterranean Space of Control” (funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant). His latest book is titled We Are All Migrants: Political Action and the Ubiquitous Condition of Migrant-hood (2015). His previous book is titled The Migration Apparatus: Security, Labor, and Policymaking in the European Union (2012). Dr. Feldman is the founder and president of the Vancouver Society for the Promotion of the Liberal Arts. He cofounded the Interest Group for the Anthropology of Public Policy (now the Association for the Anthropology of Policy). He also cofounded and is a steering committee member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.

Carol J. Greenhouse (to 2018) is Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, United States. A sociocultural anthropologist, her interests are in the ethnography of law and politics, especially with respect to federal power in the United States. Recent publications include The Paradox of Relevance (2011), on ethnography and citizenship in the United States and, as editor, Ethnographies of Neoliberalism (2010). Dr. Greenhouse has served as president of the American Ethnological Society, the Law and Society Association, and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology; she is also a past editor of American Ethnologist.

Chris Hann (to 2018) is a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. Before moving to Germany, he taught social anthropology at the universities of Cambridge and Kent, United Kingdom. His current research explores the intersections between economic life and morality, drawing on long-term fieldwork in Eastern Europe and Chinese Central Asia (Xinjiang). Recent books include Ritual and Economy: Studies of Postsocialist Transformation (edited with Stephen Gudeman, 2015) and Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique (with Keith Hart, 2011).

Benjamin Hegarty is a Senior Research Associate in the Asia and Pacific Health Program at the Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney. His research interests include queer approaches to the study of inequality, infectious disease epidemics, and science and technology in Southeast Asia. His first book is The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia published by Cornell University Press. In 2024/2025 he is a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Paris, and a research affiliate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford.

Margaret Jolly (to 2022) is a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and professor in the School of Culture, History and Language at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. She was an Australian Research Council laureate fellow from 2010 to 2015. She has written extensively on gender in the Pacific, exploratory voyages, missions and contemporary Christianity, maternity and sexuality, cinema, and art. Her most recent book is Divine Domesticities: Christian Paradoxes in Asia and the Pacific (edited with Hyaeweol Choi, 2014). She is presently working on gender and climate change in the Pacific.

Dr. Helen Kopnina (Ph.D. Cambridge University, 2002) is employed at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK. Helen teaches sustainable business and conducts research within four interrelated main areas: sustainability, business, and environmental ethics, environmental education, and biological conservation. Helen has (co)- authored over two hundred articles and seventeen books.

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (to 2018) is a national researcher (level 3) in the Mexican National Research System. He has done research and written on topics such as development, environmentalism, international migration, cyberculture, globalization, transnationalism, and world anthropologies. He has written and edited twenty-one volumes (including translations) in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, and more than 180 chapters and articles in various journals and books published in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America, in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Japanese, French, and German. He is a vice president of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (2009–18). He is the author of the article “World Anthropologies: Anthropological Cosmopolitanisms and Cosmopolitics” (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2013).

Gordon Mathews is an Emeritus Research Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is the Deputy Chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations.  He has written What Makes Life Worth Living?  How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds (1996), Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket (2000), Hong Kong China: Learning to Belong to a Nation (2008, with Tai-lok Lui and Kit-wai Ma), Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (2011), The World in Guangzhou (2017, with Linessa Dan Lin and Yang Yang) and Life After Death Today in the United States, Japan, and China (2023, with Yang Yang and Miu Ying Kwong).

Atsuro Morita (from 2021) teaches anthropology and science and technology studies at Osaka University. After working on the global knowledge network of hydrology and water management, he is currently working on Japanese sustainability movements and their efforts to remake infrastructures. His publication includes: Being Affected by Sinking Deltas: Changing Landscapes, Resilience, and Complex Adaptive Systems in the Scientific Story of the Anthropocene (co-authored with Wakana Suzuki, in Current Anthropology 60 (s20)) and The World Multiple: Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds (co-edited with Keiichi Omura, Grant Otsuki and Shiho Satsuka, Routledge) and Infrastructure and Social Complexity: A Companion (co-edited with Penny Hervey and Casper Bruun Jensen, Routledge).

Catherine Panter-Brick (to 2018) is professor of anthropology, health, and global affairs at Yale University, United States, and the medical anthropology senior editor for Social Science & Medicine. Her research addresses issues of risk and resilience in contexts of war, displacement, famine, and poverty; she has directed more than forty interdisciplinary projects in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. She publishes extensively in mental health and social sciences journals and has coedited seven books, most recently Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of Practice (2015), Pathways to Peace (2014), and Health, Risk, and Adversity (2010). She is a recipient of the Lucy Mair Medal & Marsh Prize for Applied Anthropology, an award that honors excellence in the active recognition of human dignity.

Tania Pérez-Bustos (from 2021) is a feminist scholar working on technologies and knowledge dialogues. She currently focuses her research interests on handmade textiles as technologies of knowledge and care. She is the founder of Artesanal Tecnológica, an intergenerational and transdisciplinary feminist sewing/collective/laboratory that explores the dialogues between craft textile making and digital technologies. She is associate professor at the School of Gender Studies at the National University of Colombia. Tania is interested in transdisciplinary work from which to explore methodologies that enable transformative research and pedagogies.

Camilla Power (to 2018) is a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of East London, United Kingdom. Her research has focused on the evolutionary emergence of symbolic culture, language, art, and religion. She has published numerous articles on hunter-gatherer cosmology, gender ritual, and rock art, and is coeditor of Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology (2017).

Caroline Schuster (from 2022) is Senior Lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University where she is also the Director of the Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies. Her research interests include feminist approaches to the study of capitalism, debt, financialisation, and weather disasters in Latin America. Her books include Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy (2015) and the forthcoming graphic ethnography Forecasts: a story of weather and finance at the edge of disaster.

Paul Sillitoe (to 2018) is professor of anthropology at the University of Durham, United Kingdom. His interests include development and social change, human ecology and ethnoscience, livelihood, and technology, with a particular interest in the Pacific. His current research interests focus on natural resource management, technology, and development. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Papua New Guinea's Highlands, is currently involved in projects in South Asia, and has recently been involved in projects in the Arabian Gulf region. His recent publications include Built in Niugini: Constructions in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (2017) and From Land to Mouth: The Agricultural “Economy” of the Wola of the New Guinea Highlands (2010).

Brian Street (1943–2017) (to 2017) was professor emeritus of language in education at King's College London, United Kingdom, and visiting professor of education in the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, United States. Over the past twenty-five years, he undertook anthropological field research and was a consultant to projects in many countries. His commitment to linking ethnographic-style research on the cultural dimension of language and literacy with contemporary practice in education and in development was evident in his contributions to more than 30 books and over 120 scholarly articles. Some of his most notable publications include Literacy and Development: Ethnographic Perspectives (2000), Social Literacies (1995), his edited collection Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy (1993), and Literacy in Theory and Practice (1985). He also coauthored Adult Literacy and International Development: Stories from the Field (2012) with Alan Rogers, with whom, at the time of his untimely death, he was involved in an international project titled “Learning Empowerment through Training in Ethnographic Research.” He was also president of the British Association for Literacy in Development.

Simon Underdown (from 2019) is Reader in Biological Anthropology and Director of the Centre of Environment and Society at Oxford Brookes University. Specialising in human evolution his research focusses on the co-evolution of humans and disease and how patterns of human-disease interaction in the past can be used to reconstruct human evolutionary patterns and processes and especially the role played by diseases in shaping the adaptive environment during human evolution and the impact of disease exchange during contact between hominin species. He has carried out fieldwork across the world including South America, the Middle East and especially southern Africa.

Antonia Walford (from 2021) is a Lecturer in Digital Anthropology at UCL. Their research explores the effects of the exponential growth of digital data on social and cultural imaginaries and practices, with a focus on the natural sciences and environmental politics. They have published articles and chapters on topics such as data power and the politics of informational practices in the sciences, data aesthetics, anthropological methods and transdisciplinarity. They recently co-edited, with Rachel Douglas-Jones and Nick Seaver, a special issue in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021).