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PhD, Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge (2002)
Reader in Social Anthropology
Contact:
Tel: +44 (0)20 7679 8639
Fax: +44 (0)20 7679 8632
E-mail: m.holbraad@ucl.ac.uk
Room: 139
Office hours: Tuesdays 9-11
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Full list of Publications |
SELECTED PAPERS AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD
GENERAL INTERESTS
Martin Holbraad's main field research is in Cuba, where he focuses on Afro-Cuban religions and socialist politics. Having completed in 2002 his doctoral thesis on the role of oracles and money within the diviner cult of Ifà in socialist Cuba, his research since has focused on the relationship between myth and action, the consecration of objects, and, more broadly, the logic of cosmological thought in the field of religion, politics and art. These ethnographic interests inform his theoretical concerns with such topics as the anthropology of truth and the imagination, abstraction and divinity, thing-theory, and the relationship between anthropological and philosophical analysis.
CURRENT RESEARCH
Martin Holbraad’s is the author of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination
(Chicago, 2012), which is an attempt to experiment with the
conceptualization of truth in divination and in anthropology. He is also
co-editor of a volume on the role of artefacts
in anthropological thinking, called Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (Routledge, 2007), a special issue of the journal
Ethnos titled Technologies of the Imagination (2009), and a volume on the
anthropology of security, stemming from inter-disciplinary research
with political scientists at the
Centre for Advanced Security Theory in Copenhagen University since 2009, titled
Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest and the Future (Routledge, 2013).
Since 2008 Holbraad has also been conducting research with the UK-based theatre groups
Frantic Assembly and Real Circumstance,
exploring the practices of theatrical creativity and its ‘reality effects.’
Holbraad’s current
work focuses on revolutionary politics in Cuba and elsewhere, relating
socialist political cosmologies to ascetic ontologies of the self. A number of his peer reviewed articles and other published items (reviews, polemics, responses etc.) can be accessed
here.
TEACHING
Martin Holbraad teaches courses in ethnography and anthropological theory at undergraduate and Masters’ level, as well as an advanced optional course titled 'Alterity and Experiment in Anthropological Thinking'. Since 2012 he also convenes an optional course on Cosmos, Society and the Political Imagination, which he co-teaches with Allen Abramson and Bruce Kapferer.
RESEARCH STUDENTS
Martin Holbraad helps run two Reading and Research Groups at UCL: The Cosmology, Religion, Ontology and Culture (CROC) group, which brings together staff and research students who share an ethnographic interest in cosmological thought; and the Performance, Theatre and Ethnographies of the Imagination group, which brings together staff and research students interested in the anthropology of the performing arts.
He is first supervisor of the following Doctoral students:
Tobia Farnetti (2012, cosmologies of collapse in the Russian North, ESRC)
Daniel Sherer (2011, theatrical work and the American Dream, ESRC)
David Cooper (2010, historicity, land and politics in Nicaragua, ESRC)
Julia Frajtag Sauma (2008, Maroon political cosmologies in the Brazilian Amazon, ESRC)
Belkais Rouached (2008, divination in Iran, Aga Khan studentship)
Babis Kontarakis (2007, spirits and Islam in Egypt, Greek State Scholarship)
Alessandra Basso Ortiz (2006, part-time, Afro-Cuban religion and social improvisation in socialist Cuba, AHRC)
He is co-supervisor to:
Carolina Balthazar (2011, second hand shopping and magic in Britain)
Viorel Anastasoaie (2006, work, knowledge and value among tobacco growers in Cuba, Marie Curie)
He is second supervisor to:
Vita Peacock (2010, hierarchy and personhood in the Max Planck Society, AHRC)
Timothy Carroll (2010, shifting ontologies of fabric in Eastern Orthodox Christianity)
Matan Shapiro (2008, kinship, intimacy and affect in Maranhão, Northeast Brazil, ORS)
Razvan Dumitru (2006, regulating markets in Moldova, Marie Curie)
Completed Doctoral Students:
Anna Cristina Pertierra (The struggle for consumption in urban Cuba, awarded 2006)
Diana Espirito Santo (Spiritism in Cuba, awarded 2009) [LINK NAME TO ]
Sergio Gonzalez Varela (Power, symbolism, and play in Afro-Brazilian Capoeira, awarded 2009)
Marjorie Murrey (Cosmology, personhood and the self in Madrid, awarded 2009)
Damon Dennis (Writing, numbers and material culture in Morocco, awarded 2010)
Piergiorgio di Giminiani (Ancestral lands, modern transactions: land restoration among the Mapuche in Chile, awarded 2011)
