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…

Jeffrey Miley is Lecturer of Political Sociology in the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University. His research interests include comparative nationalisms, language politics, the politics of migration, religion and politics, regime types, and democratic theory.

Simon Pirani is the author of “Burning Up: A global history of fossil fuel consumption” (forthcoming in 2018 from Pluto Press). He is a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Kathy Garlow (left) and Mary Sandy are representatives from the Six Nations on the Grand River community in Ontario, Canada. Their primary concern is to help defend their community against colonisation and develop international links in the struggle for indigenous sovereignty. The Haudenosaunee have been living as a Confederacy of nations organised by direct consensual…

Simone Pika lectures in evolutionary anthropology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Manchester. She wrote her Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany, in collaboration with the Department of Ethology, University of Münster, Germany. Her research centres on the evolutionary roots of language by pinpointing similarities and differences in…