This Anthropology Colloquium is co-sponsored by the IHR’s Religious & Secular Entanglements Research Cluster.

Dr. Fenella Cannell is a specialist in Southeast Asian anthropology, and has also conducted research on kinship and religion in the United States. She worked in the Philippines in 1988-89, 1992, and 1997. Her fieldwork was with Catholic rice-farming people in a rural area, but on the outskirts of a small town, where people were also exposed to complex, urbanising influences and images from Manila and from the West, especially America. Her research explored the ways in which people come to think about “culture” in a post-colonial society, and focused on women’s lives and arranged marriage, spirit-mediumship, saint’s cults and religion, and popular performances including transvestite beauty contests. She has since carried out historically-based work on the Philippines, especially on education, kinship, and gender in the American colonial period. She also works with a number of postgraduate students whose research is based in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, and intends to do more work in the region in the future. Most recently, however, she has conducted a two-year research project on American kinship and religion, with a particular focus on Mormonism. Much of this research took place in upstate New York and in Utah. In addition to these field-based projects, Dr. Cannell has written more broadly on the relationship between Christianity and social theory.

Dr. Fenella Cannell, London School of Economics and Political Science