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Research area(s)

• Psychological and psychiatric anthropology
• Emotion
• Religion and ritual
• Indonesia and Mexico
• New approaches to ethnographic writing

Research Interests

Like many anthropologists who have worked in tribal societies, I started as a generalist, covering kinship, religion, ritual, and politics. Fieldwork in Java further developed interests in Islam, syncretism, mysticism and tolerance. I also have a longstanding interest in emotion: what is it? does anthropology have any special contribution? how should we write about it? In recent years I have been involved in international multidisciplinary collaborations on emotion and co-authored with 30 leading emotion theorists a position paper in Nature (Human Behaviour) announcing a new paradigm in the affective sciences. I am an associate editor of Emotion Review and a board member of the International Society for Research on Emotion. Work-in-progress includes a multidisciplinary volume/handbook on emotion, of which I am co-editor and contributor. 

Other recent work has explored narrative ethnography and literary techniques of presentation within a broadly humanistic agenda. The aim is twofold: to render the flow of experience more precisely and to capture a wider audience for anthropology.

Project details

Anthropology of emotion (Cambridge University Press)

‘After the Ancestors’, a narrative ethnography of Nias, Indonesia

Completed:

British Academy (R30062) Emotion in two Indonesian societies£4000 March - May 2011 Andrew Beatty (PI)