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Tel: +44 20 7679 8639 E-mail: m.holbraad@ucl.ac.uk |
There are many highly respectable motives which may lead men to prosecute research, but three which are much more important than the rest. The first (without which the rest must come to nothing) is intellectual curiosity, desire to know the truth. Then, professional pride, anxiety to be satisfied with one's performance, the shame that overcomes any self-respecting craftsman when his work is unworthy of his talent. Finally, ambition, desire for reputation, and the position, even the power or the money, which it brings. It may be fine to feel, when you have done your work, that you have added to the happiness or alleviated the suffering of others, but that will not be why you did it. So if a mathematician, or a chemist, or even a physiologist, were to tell me that the driving force in his work had been the desire to benefit humanity, then I should not believe him (nor should I think the better of him if I did). His dominant motives have been those which I have stated, and in which, surely, there is nothing of which any decent man need be ashamed. (G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology, CUP, 1940) |
PhD, Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge (2002)
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Publications |
GENERAL INTERESTS
Martin Holbraad's main field research is in Cuba, where he focuses on Afro-Cuban religions and socialist politics. Having written 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 as well as in politics. These ethnographic interests inform his theoretical concerns with such topics as the anthropology of truth and the imagination, abstraction and divinity, and the relationship between anthropological and philosophical analysis.
CURRENT RESEARCH
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Martin Holbraad recently co-edited a book on the role of artefacts in anthropological thinking, called Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (Routledge, 2007) and a special issue of the journal Ethnos titled Technologies of the Imagination (2009). His own monograph, provisionally titled Cuban Divination and Anthropological Truth, is in preparation. He has recently also conducted new ethnographic research on the relationship between socialist ethics and religious morality in Cuba, funded by the British Academy, as well as research with the UK-based physical theatre group Frantic Assembly, exploring the practices of theatrical creativity and its 'reality effects'. In 2009 he was Visiting Researcher in an inter-disciplinary project with politcal scientists at the Centre for Advanced Security Theory in Copenhagen University, writing on notions of Revolution and sacrifice in socialist political cosmologies. |
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TEACHING
Martin Holbraad teaches courses in ethnography and anthropological theory at undergraduate and Master's level, as well as an advanced optional course titled 'Alterity, Experiment and Transgression in Anthropological Thinking'. He also convenes the Individual Studies programme for 3rd year undergraduates.
RESEARCH STUDENTS
Martin Holbraad helps run the Cosmology Group at UCL, which brings together research students who share an ethnographic interest in cosmological thought.
He is first supervisor or co-supervisor of the following Doctoral students:
Piergiorgio di Giminiani (2006, land rights and collective action among the Mapuche in Chile, Wenner-Gren)
Alessandra Basso Ortiz (2006, part-time, Afro-Cuban religion and social improvisation in socialist Cuba, AHRC)
Viorel Anastasoaie (2006, apprenticeship among Cuban Tobacco farmers, Marie Curie)
Babis Kontarakis (2007, spirits and divination in Egypt, Greek State Scholarship)
Julia Sauma (2008, maroon cosmologies in Brazil, ESRC)
Matan Shapiro (2008, kinship and intimacy in Brazil, ORS)
Belkais Rouached (2008, divination in Iran, Aga Khan studentship)
He is second supervisor to:
Damon Dennis (2004, writing, numbers and material culture in Morocco, ESRC)
Oliver Deepwell (2005, cabala symbolism in London, AHRC)
Razvan Dumitru (2006, markets in Moldova, Marie Curie)
Tom McDonaland (2008, denim and motility in China, ESRC)
Recent Doctoral Students:
Anna Cristina Pertierra ('The struggle for consumption in urban Cuba', awarded 2006)
Diana Espirito-Santo (Spiritism in Cuba, awarded 2009)
Sergio Gonzalez Varela (Capoeira Angola in Bahia, awarded 2009)
Marjorie Murrey (Material Culture and the Self in Madrid, awarded 2009)
