This workshop aims to explore and untangle various configurations of three anthropological categories: kinship, ethics, and economics. While kinship was once the defining topic of study for anthropology, it has fallen out of fashion in recent years. Anthropology may have lost analytical sight of kinship, but this aspect of human life is still very salient in the lives of people everywhere. With this workshop, we reintroduce kinship as a dynamic factor in ethical and economic life in the pursuit of anthropological theory that more accurately captures the complexities of the world.

Please send an email before 12 noon on 26th November to Connie Tang (pyt20@cam.ac.uk) to register.

Presentation abstracts Frank Ngo Pilgrims of the peripheral – Centers and peripheries between Japan and Christendom Pilgrimage shares many traits with tourism, and much of the anthropologies of the two realize both forms of mobility draw from one another to fulfill religious, economic, or leisurely ends. In this paper I inquire what social changes come […]

A Max-Cam public and virtual lecture In an interview with the Sunday Times two years after her stunning electoral triumph, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher proclaimed “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” This lecture contends that the deployment of religious notion of the soul and Thatcher’s well-documented commitment […]

We are excited to host the (un)official launch party for our Philomathia/Max Cam scholar Juan del Nido on March 3rd. We will have a fantastic line up of speakers present to discuss Juan’s book and will be able to spend two hours together to think through his work and broader questions on taxis, Uber, technology, […]

Isaiah Berlin remarks that  ‘almost every moralist in history has praised freedom. Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems to be able to resist.’ (1971: 121). In this paper, I draw on fieldwork among self-identified economically right-wing libertarians in […]

To celebrate the publication of the Centre Coordinator Johannes Lenhard’s book, Making Better Lives: Hope, Freedom and Home-Making among people sleeping rough in Paris, we will host an online book forum on Wednesday June 8th. The discussion will be kicked off by short contributions from Michele Lancione (Torino), Luisa Schneider (Amsterdam), Chris Herring (Harvard/UCAL) and […]

While scholars might once have been inclined to think of the economy as a driver of ethical transformation and religion as a force for the preservation of traditional moral ideas and practices, it has become clear that the relation between religious and economic dimensions of moral change is much more complex and multi-dimensional. This interdisciplinary […]