Category: People

Tamara Turner is a final-year PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at King’s College London where she specializes in the Sufi-related musics of North Africa and others considered within popular Islam. Her current PhD research is the first ethnomusicological study of the Algerian ritual and music called diwan. Tamara’s research is funded by King’s College London, the…

I have been doing anthropological research on hunter-gatherer societies since 2009, when I travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to work with the Mbuti, who were made famous for their egalitarian social order by Colin Turnbull’s popular ethnography The Forest People. I went on to complete a PhD thesis at UCL under the supervision…

Mark G. Thomas is Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at the Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. In 2009 – in collaboration with Prof Stephen Shennan and Dr Adam Powell – Thomas published a study in the journal Science showing that population density and or migratory activity are likely to be…

James Woodburn is the world’s leading theorist on egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies; he has just returned from visiting the Hadza people of Tanzania.

After carrying out two years of field research on a ‘cargo cult’ in New Britain, Papua New Guinea in the late eighties, Harvey Whitehouse developed a theory of ‘modes of religiosity’ that has been the subject of extensive critical evaluation and testing by anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and cognitive scientists. In recent years, he has focused…

Charles Whitehead was creative director of an advertising agency for twenty years before gaining his PhD in social anthropology at University College London. He teaches anthropology to cognitive science students at the University of Westminster, and is currently involved in brain imaging research on pretend play at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience. His research…

David Wengrow lectures at the Institute of Archaeology.

Dr Ivan Tacey is a lecturer in Anthropology and Criminology at the University of Plymouth. His research interests include hunter-gatherers, animism, environmental relations, globalization, place making, and violence. His long-term research with Batek hunter-gatherers of Peninsular Malaysia explored how interconnectivity, environmental change and socio-political marginalization have led to realignments of these indigenous peoples’ animistic practices…

Thea Skaanes is Managing Curator of the UNESCO collections at the Moesgaard Museum, Denmark. The author of many scientific papers, she has conducted extensive field research into the material culture, social life and cosmology of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Her writing and lecturing has been described as ‘dripping from blood, taboo, darkness, ancestors and…

Paula Sheppard is a Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.