How to write a proposal that integrates your literature review, research objective and questions, your methods and methodology? Over the years I have been approached countless times by students and inexperienced researchers with questions about writing a research proposal for the social sciences. Often they have a draft, but the
We are all consumers of many kinds of goods, and in that capacity, we can hardly be unaware of the importance of the containers in which those goods are packaged. Containers protect and condition what they contain, and they can be part of the experience of consumption, enhancing or limiting
A guest editorial on ‘Post-truth anthropology’ that I wrote for Anthropology Today is out today. It’s paywalled, I’m happy to send the text on request if you can’t access it. Edit: it has now been made open access for a period of 6 months — if it’
I’ve been talking to a colleague recently about developing a project on religion and economics under the auspices of the Religion and Political Culture Network (RPCN) at the University of Manchester. This has got me thinking about Buddhism, economics and Buddhist economics, and has led me to reread Ernst
This post is a continuation of my thoughts in my previous post… Now to Needham’s review of Veyne’s book. The review is short, and much is taken up with flattering comments on Veyne’s style, but overall the conclusion is negative—he characterises the argument as ‘erratic and
I recently came across a review by Rodney Needham of Paul Veyne’s Did the Greeks believe in their myths? I was quite intrigued by this as these two authors are representatives of two approaches to the study of religious belief and the anthropology of belief I have been thinking
Over the weekend I read Wilfred Cantwell Smith‘s The Meaning and End of Religion (1962). I knew a little about this book from Talal Asad’s 2001 article (jStor paywall), which I suppose is the main way most anthropologists of religion have come to know its content too. Asad
This is my first post in a long time. Over the last year I moved to Manchester and started teaching full time. I hope to return to blogging from time to time. Recently I’ve seen the transcript of the 2012 GDAT debate on the concept of neoliberalism, which is
I’ve set up a JISCMail mailing list for discussion of the social scientific study of ignorance. The list will be publicly archived. To subscribe or contribute, click HERE. Get in touch with me if you have any questions. (The image above is ‘see, hear, speak no evil’ by Chris
Registration is now open for the conference: Speaking Ethically Across Borders: Interdisciplinary Approaches 8-10 January 2014 CRASSH, University of Cambridge With lectures by: Michael Lambek (Toronto) and Simon Coleman (Toronto). Including papers by: Michael Lempert (Michigan), John Marenbon (Cambridge), Carlo Severi (EHESS), Hallvard Lillehammer (Birbeck). ***For registration and further
Here’s my review of Abby Day’s Believing in Belonging which appeared in last year’s edition of the Journal of Religion and Society. Though I didn’t quite buy the theoretical argument of the book, I thought the substantive work on people’s attitudes towards institutionalised religion, gods,
As promised, here’s a post-print version of my Cultures of Belief article, which was published in Anthropological Theory. cultures-of-belief-post-print The text is identical to the journal version, but the formatting is different — this is the version I’m allowed to distribute according to the