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MPhil/PhD Anthropology (GRS)
University College London (Oct 2013)
MA Material and Visual Culture (Dist)
(AHRC)
University College London (Sept 2009)
BA Honours History (First)
University of Cambridge (June 2007)
PhD title: The last big-man standing: hierarchy and
personhood in the Max Planck Society
First Supervisor: Prof Suzanne Kuechler
Second Supervisor: Dr Martin Holbraad
Email: vita.peacock@ucl.ac.uk
Summary
I spent fourteen months of fieldwork in
various parts of Germany working with the Directors, Scientists and Technicians
of Germany's 'most successful research organisation', the Max Planck Society, a
largely state-funded institution with over eighty Institutes across the country
(and several abroad). Having originally intended to focus on a different
project, I soon became fascinated by what the French mythographer Georges Dumézil
called the 'Indo-European tripartite division of social function', i.e. the
particular logic of hierarchy within the Max Planck Society which produces a
three-tired structure of incommensurable subjectivities. I am now writing up,
and am engaging particularly with Louis Dumont's canonical study of hierarchy,
as well as studies of Melanesian big-men, to explore the range of selves this
institution produces, and how this is situated within a Teutonic political
theology with its roots in the philosophies of German idealism.
This research is funded by:
UCL Graduate School PhD Scholarship
Royal Anthropological Society - "Sutasoma Award" from Emslie Hornimann Fund
Schools Competition Act Settlement Trust – Project Award
UCL Department of Anthropology
