How do religious narratives persuade their readers to believe their message? And how can it be that some readers even come to treat fantasy and science fiction as authoritative religious texts? These are the core questions treated in Markus Davidsen’s new book Narrative and Belief: The Religious Affordance…

Cultural Anthropologist Erik de Maaker published, together with Monica Janoswki (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), Stories across Borders: Myths of Origin and Their Contestation in the Borderlands of South and Southeast Asia in Southeast Asian Studies (SEAS).

In this sub-project a selected number of narrative texts will be examined written in the Eurasian realm in the period 1300-1800, focusing on representations of kingship and royal authority.

Religions involve belief in the unbelievable: in evil spirits causing disease, in souls surviving death, and in gods punishing wrongdoers and blessing the just. Cognitive studies suggest that humans are predisposed to speculate about fate and divine agency, but support from so-called ‘plausibility structures’…

Postcolonial Displacements explores the multiple ways in which migration in South Asia contributes to the imagining, questioning, subverting and reframing of territories, nations and communities. The project focuses on the contested fringes of the politically divided South Asian subcontinent, across…

The objective of this research project is to expand and problematize the notion of ‘military architecture’, particularly in the Dutch context, through my artistic practice as a filmmaker.

Spirited narratives of purpose and progress: church-society engagement alongside the (Company-) state

By the end of the sixteenth century, stories about the Revolt in the Low Countries (c. 1567-1648) had begun to spread throughout Europe. These stories had very different authors with very different intentions.

In this paper for Defence Strategic Communications, Alastair Reed and Jennifer Dowling seek to show the importance of historical narratives to propaganda by identifying and exploring five ways in which such narratives are exploited to reinforce the extremists' 'competitive system of meaning'.

How are the narrative concerns of Nigerian female writers constructed in relation to the structure to their society?

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami caused immense destruction and over 170,000 deaths in the Indonesian province of Aceh. The disaster spurred large-scale social and political changes in Aceh, including the intensified implementation of shari‘a law and an end to the long separatist conflict. After the Tsunami…

This research hopes to contribute to social awareness of the consequences of colonialism for Indigenous Peoples, to the deconstruction of still existing colonial and discriminatory notions and to a better appreciation of Indigenous art and thought.

This PhD project analyses the politics and aesthetics of depictions of torture in American and European ‘war on terror’ films.

This study presents a re-evaluation of Malay adventure stories.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published Annemarie Samuels' article on the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. It's a detailed ethnographic account of the experiences of three Indonesian survivors.

This book considers the porous relationship between legality and illegality in Brazil, a country that presages political and societal changes in hitherto unprecedented dimensions.

Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies.

Muge Özoglu defended her dissertation on 5 December 2018

In this article, Samuels elaborates the concept of narrative navigation to analyze the subjective and intersubjective ways in which people struggle through experiences of illness by constructing multiple, ambiguous and non-linear narratives that may continuously change, as they reposition themselves…

How is social cognition shaped by our knowledge of language and stories?

If Dutch cinema is examined in academic studies, the focus is usually on pre-war films or on documentaries, but the post-war fiction film has been sporadically addressed.

Part of ‘Moralising Misfortune: A Comparative Anthropology of Commercial Insurance’, an ERC Consolidator project of Erik Bähre.

Channi Li defended her thesis on 15 October 2019.

This dissertation gives an ethnographic account of Kurdish dengbêj narrative from a theorethical perspective.

In this article, Samuels focuses on the active fostering of subjunctivity in processes of narrative worldmaking. Drawing extensively from the narrative of an HIV‐positive woman in Indonesia, she shows that by subjunctively leaving open multiple narrative trajectories and future possibilities, individuals…

How were Spanish commanders fighting in the Low Countries between 1567 and 1577 portrayed in Spanish and Dutch narrative sources during the Eighty Years War?

Religions involve belief in the unbelievable: in evil spirits causing disease, in souls surviving death, and in gods punishing wrongdoers and blessing the just. Cognitive studies suggest that humans are predisposed to speculate about fate and divine agency, but support from so-called ‘plausibility structures’…

Lecture

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.

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Lecture, Friends of the Kern Institute lecture

Conference

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Masterclass

Lecture, Masterclass

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Lecture, Leiden Interdisciplinary Migration Seminar (LIMS)

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PhD Defence

PhD Defence

PhD Defence

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