James Staples

Qualifications

• PhD Social Anthropology (SOAS, London) 2003
• BA (Hons) Social Anthropology (SOAS, London) 1990
• PG Cert (Brunel) 2008

Personal Biography

After completing a first degree in anthropology in 1990 I worked for nearly ten years as a journalist before my ongoing fascination with South India drew me back to SOAS, University of London, to undertake a PhD. Thanks to ESRC and British Academy Fellowships I was able to stay on there for four years after completion as a post-doctoral fellow, broadening out my initial research on the social consequences of leprosy to consider how attitudes towards negatively construed bodily differences in India are shaped by – and shape – ideas about what constitutes human completeness. A further 16-months’ fieldwork in Hyderabad examined how the category of disability is constituted in multiple ways, and how it is experienced by disabled people in their day-to-day interactions. I joined Brunel as a lecturer in January 2007, returning regularly to my original field site to pursue new research on various topics, including food and social mobility, and suicide.

Research Overview

I am a social anthropologist with a regional interest in South Asia and a long-standing fascination in how bodily differences are experienced, socially and viscerally, that continues to shape my work. I return regularly to the South Indian leprosy colony I have been visiting since 1984 to pursue ongoing fieldwork that has taken me in several directions, including a study of suicide; ongoing work on food and social mobility; and the writing of a detailed biographical account of a leprosy-affected man’s life.

Member, Centre for Research in International Medical Anthropology (CRIMA)

Current Projects

Holy cows and chicken Manchuria: food and social mobility in provincial South India
2012 -
James Staples (PI)
This project develops my existing work on food in South Asia by documenting and then analysing how major socio-economic and ecological changes in the region – beginning with the Green Revolution in the late 1960s and continuing through the liberal economic reforms of the 1990s and beyond – also transform how people consume and relate to food on an everyday basis. In particular, through life history interviews and participant observation I aim to explore how the people I work with in rural and small-town South India, often on the peripheries of what was described as an ‘emergent middle class’, utilise food and dining relationships to assert positive identities and affect social mobility.

Recently Completed Projects

British Academy (SG-47129)
Suicide, youth and farmers in South India
£2,606
July 2007 - September 2009
James Staples (PI)

Disabled lives: understanding disability through ethnographic biography
2009 - 2010
James Staples (PI)

PhD Supervision

Pat Mahon-Daly: Blood, society and the gift: an ethnography of change in the giving relationship; Submitted June 2012

Audrey Callum: Health beliefs, illness perception and care behaviour among British Afro-Caribbeans with diabetes; 2008

Gemma Keogh: Tibetan monks in exile; 2009 -

Michelle Carter: Learning to be a nurse; 2010 -

Eva Luksaite: The intimate state: female sterilisation, citizenship and the body in North India; 2011 -

Undergraduate Programmes

Module convenor

• Research Methods in Anthropology (level 1)
• Ethnography of a selected region: South Asia (levels 2 and 3)
• The Anthropology of Disability and Difference (level 3)
• Anthropology of the Body (level 3)

Module contributor

• Fieldwork Encounters: Thinking Through Ethnography (level 1)

Postgraduate Programmes

Programme convenor

• MSc Medical Anthropology (until September 2012)

Module convenor

• The Body: Anthropological Perspectives
• Anthropological Approaches to Disability and Difference

• Senior Tutor
• Touchpoint team leader for Student Experience
• Undergraduate convenor (from September 2012)
• Admissions Tutor (until September 2012)

• Honorary Reviews Editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society (JRAI) (2007 - )
• Member of Council, Royal Anthropological Institute (2011 - 2014)
• Publications Officer and Committee member of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) (2008 - 2013)
• Editorial board member of the journal Ethnographica: Journal of Culture and Disability (EJCD)
• External Examiner, SOAS MA Medical Anthropology (2010 - 2011)
• External Examiner, BA Anthropology Programmes at Goldsmiths, London (2012 - 2015)