Social Anthropology
Social Anthropology at Edinburgh is a major international centre of undergraduate and postgraduate training, and we offer regional specialisations in Africa, South Asia and Latin America. We are also one of the premier research departments in the United Kingdom. Rooted in a strong disciplinary tradition our research asks challenging questions about contemporary global problems, putting us at at the cutting edge of Social Anthropology.
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Markets, morals and medicalised maternity: navigating a shifting health service terrain in Bangladesh
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-04-25)This thesis lies at the nexus of recent transitions towards medicalised childbirth, marketisation of maternal health services and moralities of care, examining how women, their families and health actors navigate ... -
Spectacles of Development: The Materiality of Success at the Barefoot College, Rajasthan
(The University of Edinburgh, 2013-11-27)Through an ethnographic study of the 'Barefoot College', an internationally renowned non¬ governmental development organisation (NGO) situated in Rajasthan, India, this thesis investigates the methods and practices by ... -
Surviving senses: life-forms in a contaminated world after the Fukushima nuclear disaster
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-04-11)This thesis explores efforts to rebuild a sense of everyday life in the ruins of the 2011 ‘triple disaster’ in Japan—a disaster which included an earthquake, a tsunami, and the subsequent meltdown of the nuclear powerplant ... -
Toxicities, illegalities and protest: a landscape of coal in South India
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-13)This thesis focuses on the construction and operation of state-owned coal-fired thermal power plants in Ennore, a coastal peninsular suburb located to the north of Chennai (Tamil Nadu, India). At the time of my research, ... -
Fractals of a mountain: human-environment relations in the Peruvian Andes
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-12-22)This thesis is about the personhood of mountains in the southern Peruvian Andes and the ways in which Quechua-speaking people called Runakuna attempt to enter into reciprocal yet asymmetric exchange relations with them. ... -
Dog person: nature–cultures of more-than-human kinship in Edinburgh and on the internet
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-12-08)This dissertation is an ethnographic bricolage of portraitures of dogs and their humans in Edinburgh and on the internet. Through stories of dogs and dog people before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, it explores the ... -
Bittersweet: living with sugar and kin in contemporary Scotland
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-08-08)This thesis explores sugar consumption and kin-making in a north Edinburgh neighbourhood, and shows that sugar is central to processes of social relatedness. I argue that sugar reveals the meaning of kinship in Scotland, ... -
Holding space: friendship, care and carcerality in the UK immigration detention system
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-21)Friendship and care are important as ideas and practices for people navigating the asylum and immigration system in Britain, but are conditioned by the carceral space of the Immigration Removal Centre (IRC). Detention, as ... -
Fast forward: technography of the social integration of connected and automated vehicles into UK society
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-09)The emerging connected and automated vehicles (CAV) have caught much research attention in the past few years. However, a techno-centric bias in the CAV research domain implies the lack of in-depth qualitative studies. To ... -
Testing and trust: Public perceptions, expectations, and experiences of COVID-19 testing in Scotland
(Scottish Chief Scientist Office, 2021-11)COVID-19 testing is a cornerstone of long-term pandemic control. Public trust in testing is essential to the success of the government’s testing strategy. This rapid qualitative study investigated public understandings, ... -
Biblical women of influence: feminine identities, imbued bodies, and intimacy among conservative evangelicals in the Ozarks
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-03-17)This thesis is about Christian women. It demonstrates how embodied Christian gender is intrinsically linked to ontological architecture in the ethnographic context of a semi-enclaved, pro-natalist, homeschooling conservative ... -
Being Church': agency and authenticity in a Protestant revival movement in Scotland
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-11-22)This thesis explores Protestant mission, discipleship, and church reform in urban Scotland. It builds upon fourteen months of ethnographic research on Cairn: a Christian movement launched in Edinburgh in 2015/16 which ... -
Making mothers, making fathers: the transition to parenthood in Edinburgh
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-11-30)This thesis investigates women and men’s experiences of the transition to parenthood in Edinburgh, UK, in the context of changing laws on parental leave and notions of ‘new fatherhood.’ In the UK, policies and care in ... -
Contending with space and time: the navigation of class, marriage, and identity by Chinese temporary migrants in the UK
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-22)The dominant discourses on young Chinese middle-class transnational migration, especially in the form of educational migration to developed western countries, view such movement as part of personal and family strategies ... -
Armed intimacy: in pursuit of security and self with gun rights activists in Southern California
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-08-06)This thesis explores how a desire to own guns is constituted within locally situated human lives in an attempt to explain why firearms have become such important objects of contestation in the United States. I spent a ... -
Being and becoming Jewish: kinship, memory, and the politics of Jewishness in post-socialist Slovakia
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-08-06)This thesis, based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, examines the entanglement of kinship, religion and politics among Jews in Bratislava. It uses marriage as a lens to explore how young Jews identify with ... -
Political afterlives of Mexico's dead and disappeared
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-06)This PhD thesis is a study of Mexican activism that aims to show how relatives of Mexico’s disappeared—often without earlier experience of human rights advocacy—become activists protesting violence through public displays ... -
Faces of shame, masks of development: recognition and oil palm among the Baining of Papua New Guinea
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-07-06)This thesis explores the role of “shame” in the Vir Kairak Baining people’s understanding of the relationships that underpin positive social change. Previous studies of shame in the context of colonial and postcolonial ... -
Order from chaos: agonism and salvation among Khmer Evangelical Christians in Phnom Penh, Cambodia
(The University of Edinburgh, 2020-01-31)This thesis is about Christian salvation in the Khmer world. It ethnographically investigates the everyday religious experiences of poor-to-middle class Khmer evangelical Christians who have predominantly migrated from ... -
‘Still there’: mediating personhood, temporality, and care in London Alzheimer’s Society support groups
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)This thesis is an investigation of the lives of people living with dementia and their families to explore how and why the ‘social death’ of the disease is mitigated through everyday practices of care. Findings are based ...
