Cwiertka wants to investigate how waste is produced and disposed of in modern East Asian society. With her research group she will be carrying out a comparative analysis on two levels: the international level (between China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan) and the inter-regional level (between East Asia…

Cristina Grasseni’s project

This project intends to provide the required knowledgebase for the design of novel mild intervention protocols to prevent fungal food spoilage.

How do different communities of residents in The Hague perceive and manage food waste in relation to citizenship (rights and responsibilities)?

Research on the morality of life insurance. What issues are raised when insurance companies define responsibility and solidarity? Has insurance changed since the crisis of 2007?

Lecture, Research Seminar

In Europe a number of production and communication strategies have long tried to establish local products as resources for local development. At the foot of the Alps, this scenario appears in all its contradictions, especially in relation to cheese production. The Heritage Arena focuses on the saga…

Lecture, LUCIS What's New?! Series

Considering the ways in which the ‘global turn’ is changing the theory and practice of historical disciplines, Explorations in History and Globalization engages with the concept and methodology of globalization, challenging traditional divisions of space and time to offer a range of perspectives on…

Anthropology of Law in Muslim Sudan analyses the hybridity of law systems and the plurality of legal practices in rural and urban contexts of contemporary Sudan, shedding light on the complex relation between Islam and society.

Social and Behavioural Sciences, Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology

Grasseni's contribution to this special feature on food cultures, food systems, and agriculture in Europe builds upon her ongoing project Food citizens? Collective food procurement in European cities: solidarity and diversity, skills and scale.

Katarzyna Cwiertka, Leiden Professor of Modern Japan Studies, was already the recipient of a VENI and a VIDI grant. Now she has also been granted a VICI, worth 1.5 million euro, for her research project Garbage Matters: A Comparative History of Waste in East Asia. ‘I want to do something that hasn’t…

The ERC project 'Food citizens?' is a comparative analysis of a growing phenomenon in Europe: collective food procurement, namely networks of people who organize direct food production, distribution, and consumption. This project studies in-depth nine cases of collective food…

The HARVEST project explores the dietary choices that our hominin ancestors and relatives made, by recovering information on what they consumed, and how factors like environmental variation, intrinsic biology, and development of food processing technologies could have influenced their decisions.

Research in the History and International Studies 1900-present specialisation addresses the interconnectedness and interdependence of contemporary global political, economic and cultural developments from a multidisciplinary perspective which is rooted in the humanities.

The major objective of the study is to ascertain how Japanese colonialism affected the manner in which food was produced, processed, prepared and consumed in the colony, and how new attitudes towards these practices were constructed.

The Europaeum programme: European History and Civilisation is a unique one-year master’s programme offered by Leiden University, Université Paris I – Panthéon/Sorbonne and the University of Oxford.

Research in the History and International Studies 1900-present specialisation addresses the interconnectedness and interdependence of contemporary global political, economic and cultural developments from a multidisciplinary perspective which is rooted in the humanities.

This project aims to situate the current policy concept of ‘valorization of scientific knowledge’ in historical and epistemological perspectives. Conceptual understanding of the utility of scientific practices is developed in dialogue with historical analyses of the politics of knowledge in European…

How do old and new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) relate to new social and political movements in Central Africa? What does this tell us about Africa and the Information Age?

Historical migration studies have long focused primarily on the European and Atlantic worlds. In this programmatic and long term project, we aim to broaden the perspective to include the full migration experience of the non-Western world.

This research programme seeks to understand the dynamics in the relationship between social media, mobile telephony and the social fabric under duress in Africa's mobile margins. It combines studies on mobility/migration, conflict and communication in an attempt to uncover these new dynamics, which…

Today, humanity produces sufficient calories, in theory, to feed the 7.7 billion people on the planet: the amount of food produced per person on the planet has gone up more than 40% since the 1960s. Yet, ironically, the prevalence of undernourishment – which had been declining for decades – has started…

This work analyzes ritual practices and knowledge related to the Mesoamerican calendar with the aim of contributing to the understanding of the use and conceptualization of this calendar system in the contemporary K’iche’ community of Momostenango, in the Highlands of Guatemala.

This dissertation aims to establish a dialogue between ethnomusicology (more specifically indigenous organology), the anthropology of art and the culture of the Apinaye peoples, in order to understand how the musical objects of these peoples are learned and taught, and thus to understand its musical…

On February 1st Cristina Grasseni started as Professor of Anthropology at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology. She is bringing the ERC Consolidator project ‘Food Citizens?’ with her to Leiden. A few questions to get to know the new professor.

Playing the piano with your forearm, plucking the strings, sawing through the piano: pianist Luk Vaes's doctoral dissertation covers all the techniques of play for which a piano is NOT designed. His defence ceremony will consist of three concerts and a public defence. 'Musicians were using the interior…

The project aims at highlighting and strengthening Dutch research into the diversity of the world’s languages from a historic and a cognitive perspective.

French title: Entre la “détresse’’ et l’inter-connectivite : le case de Mbororo réfugies sur les frontières Cameroun-Centrafrique. This research project investigates the meaning of duress in the lives of nomadic refugees in Cameroon and investigates if and how the accessibility of new ICT’s allow them…

Nearly all the university buildings have cafés and restaurants and in the city there are plenty of places to eat or drink. These include regular or fast-food facilities at local supermarkets, food stalls, snack bars or restaurants of all types and nationalities.

What does it mean to eat healthily and responsibly? This question is gaining a new urgency now that in many countries undernourishment is being overtaken by diseases of affluence, such as obesity, and we are also becoming more aware of the environmental impact of our eating habits. It’s time to take…

The soya sauce in our kitchen cabinets is not a recent acquisition. This sauce is an important element in a long history of exchange between Asia and Europe. This is what Anne Gerritsen claims in her inaugural lecture for the Kikkoman Chair on Friday 12 December.

How do Central African refugees navigate through uncertainty in a new and hostile environment in the DR Congo?

We investigate bacteria and fungi to understand their malicious or beneficial impact on food crops and their pathogenic or antibiotic role in human health.

Conference

The Anthropology and Sociology network brings together researchers of LIAS and LUCSoR working from an anthropological and sociological perspective and researchers of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences.

Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University studies the everyday practices of individuals and groups around the world in relation to the complex global challenges of diversity, sustainability, and digitalisation.

French title: Communication et violences dans le Guéra et le Moyen-Chari (Tchad) de 1940 à 2010. This research investigates the relationship between the introduction of new means of communication and violence experienced by the local populations in the Moyen-Chari and the Guéra regions in Chad from…

This book offers a new direction for the study of contemporary Islam by focusing on what being Muslim means in people’s everyday lives.