Culture, Mobility and Power (CAMP)

CAMP encompasses researchers in the Department of Anthropology who analyse the cultural, religious, economic, policy and gendered dimensions of power relations; and the political aspects of cultural, religious, social, economic and other processes.

CAMP’s anthropological approaches share a basis in ethnography, and have in common a focus on power, culture and mobility as social processes that are deeply intertwined in everyday life. Many of us situate our accounts of this everyday life in the wider context of modalities associated with transnationalism, transborder movements, historical legacies, advanced capitalism, and globalisation of state and market practices.

We are concerned with the ways in which communities engage with nationalism, ethnicity and migratory and transnational networks, with a focus on:

• Religion
• Crime
• (Il)legality
• Leadership and domination
• Political identity and violence
• Gender and kinship
• Cultural production and aesthetic representation
• (Post)colonialism, and
• Post-conflict reconciliation

CAMP’s primary aim is to examine how state and non-state actors legitimise the distribution of authority and resources through the effective adaptation of force, persuasion, materiality and governance.

Anthropologists in this cluster examine and compare various practices of social control but also resistance and indiscipline related to these themes, and explore more widely how power structures impact patterns of migration, (in)equality, and accountability along gender, class, ethnic, religious, national and other lines.

Our attention to the ways that various categories of people deal with coercion, manipulation, competition over resources, and other forms of conflict have yielded rich ethnographic accounts of direct and indirect power exercise. In addition, we examine how such themes are encoded in bodies and human exodus, religious authority and speech, economic exchanges, and in cultural representations and hierarchies of value.

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CAMP is a vibrant researcher group bound by an area of inquiry that highlights the pervasiveness of power, mobility and cultural contestations in our ethnographic locations. Our cluster is central to the department’s contributions to wider anthropological theories, methods, reflexivity, and relevance.

In general, we study classifications and power differences implicit in social relationships and in their cultural representations and enactments, along with their historical, temporal, spatial and institutional effects. Faculty, graduate students and guest researchers in our cluster are engaged with extending the genealogy and scope of studying power, culture and mobility, by highlighting the imbrications of experience and insight that sustain the renewal of modern anthropology.

Faculty and students engaged in this cluster currently have regional focus on Africa, Europe, North and Latin America, the Middle East (West Asia), and Asia.

Our cluster provides rich empirical and theoretical grounding as brought out in its publications, and creates intellectual and experiential resources for broad-based teaching themes in the department.

CAMP’s research and teaching practices contribute towards planning student careers in academia, development, humanitarian work, state and local governance, international diplomacy, governmental and non-governmental organisations, cultural and research institutes, transnational advocacy and consultancies, among others.

Centre for Global Criminology (CGC)

The Centre for Global Criminology studies crime, criminalisation and other border and boundary crossing phenomena around the world.