lse anthropology dissertation

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Our Postdoctoral Researchers

Charlotte Hawkins  

Dr Charlotte Hawkins is currently working Professor Laura Bear on the LSE Commission on Social Infrastructures, which is part of PERISCOPE , a Horizon 2020 project on covid-19 responses and pandemic preparedness. The commission will involve key community leaders, policy decision-makers and youth commissioners, to examine the challenges and possibilities of supporting inclusive ‘social infrastructures’ - the networks of care relationships across formal and informal institutions which are fundamental to pandemic and economic recovery. It seeks to reverse top-down policy processes and to highlight to role of using ethnographic ‘immersive listening’ in health policymaking. 

This builds on Charlotte’s PhD research and forthcoming monograph on ageing, care and co-operation in Kampala, Uganda, which includes significant focus on ‘social infrastructures’ across the neighbourhood she worked in, as situated in political context. The book looks at the moral, health, economic and policy implications of the everyday creative ways that people mobilise strategies of self- and mutual reliance to mitigate economic crises and state disinvestment. This draws from long-term community participation, such as in savings and women’s groups, as well as (digital) community and family care networks across generations and distances. The subsequent covid-19 pandemic and its economic consequences has further necessitated and undermined such ‘social infrastructures’ in this context, as around the world. Charlotte is now interested in using anthropological research to amplify the explicit ways people reflect on and negotiate these tensions, bridging their personal experiences and shared global issues through creative forms of collaboration, for service providers and decision-makers to learn from and build upon. Charlotte’s contribution to the LSE Commission for Social Infrastructures will also be supported with ethnographic research into pragmatic engagements with the cost of living and care crises in Hackney, London.

  Stephanie Postar

Stephanie Postar is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the LSE where her work focuses on the social dimensions of resource extraction, energy production, and scientific knowledge in East Africa. 

Stephanie is a political ecologist interested in the values of natural resources, decision-making on natural resource management, and the work of regulating energy and pollution. This research investigates historical trajectories of resource management practices and policies, and crosses scales to ethnographic experiences of extraction (anticipated, ongoing, and afterlives). She is co-editor of  Extraction/Exclusion: Beyond Binaries of Exclusion and Inclusion in Natural Resource Extraction .  Before coming to LSE, Stephanie was an S.V. Ciriacy Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Sofía Ugarte

Dr Sofía Ugarte is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in LSE Anthropology (2023-2026). She specializes in care, racism, migration and the life course in Chile and Latin America. Her research seeks to understand how experiences of difference bring to the fore novel ways of understanding the processes and relations that constitute states and markets, and how economic and political imaginaries are constructed in and through intimate subjectivities and encounters. Sofía’s PhD work with migrant Haitian women in Santiago (Chile) has been published in American Anthropologist, Focaal, and Signs, and she is finishing a book manuscript based on her dissertation, entitled  States of Care: Affective Labor and Racism in Migrant Chile.

Current research:

What is care within financialized economies and aging societies? The dramatic rise in living costs starkly highlights the material and emotional effects of financial and retirement insecurity globally. Chile constitutes a unique opportunity to study retirement insecurity and the challenges imposed on care and family dynamics because it has the oldest privatized pension system in the world and one of the highest aging indexes in Latin America. Sofía’s research at the LSE explores the theoretical and empirical intersections between care, intimacy, and politico-economic uncertainty. Concretely, her project analyzes the effects and affects of a failing model of privatized social security among older adults and their impact on household economies in urban Chile. Drawing on ethnographic research with multigenerational households and audio-visual storytelling practices, Sofía will examine how pensions and retirement schemes shape the complex intersections between aging, care, and capital. By doing so, she will seek new understandings for how intimate experiences, financial uncertainty, and imagined futures become navigation tools for aging societies going through the cost-of-living crisis.

Fred Wojnarowski

Frederick Wojnarowski is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the LSE, interested in the political, historical and economic anthropology of the Middle East, with an ethnographic focus on Jordan and especially the central highlands region around Madaba, and a thematic interest in poetical economy and ecology, social change, the construction of identity categories, and infrastructural and environmental imaginaries. His dissertation (University of Cambridge, 2021), entitled ‘Unsettling Times: land, political economy and protest in the Bedouin villages of Central Jordan’, studied Bedouin identity and politics in a time of mass-migration, economic uncertainty and unrest. His published work has featured in  History and Anthropology, Nomadic Peoples  and  Contemporary Levant . He is currently working on book project, entitled  Bled dry: contested flows and infrastructural relations in Jordan’s water system,  based on his recent research. 

Current Research: 

Across central Jordan, each morning, thousands of lowly paid operational staff fan out from the offices of  Miyahunna  (‘our water’) to turn on valves to send water to various different neighbourhoods and villages; part of a complex and carefully-calculated rationing system. As the water arrives, or fails to arrive, different experiences and subjectivities emerge. 

In the Wala River valley near Dhiban in central Jordan farmers complain that the state is bleeding them as the dammed river empties, in part to supply urban domestic users, irrigation becomes fraught and as local wells become saline and unusable. As the local agricultural and natural environment degrades, water scarcity has become a new cause taken up by longstanding local protest movements. In the nearby villages of Jabal Bani Hamida, a woman from a family of former pastoralists in an area experiencing high unemployment and decades of agricultural decline gets up at 1am to turn on the taps to receive the area’s weekly ration of piped mains water, flowing for less than 2 hours a week, at a pressure too week to fill roof storage tanks, complaining as she does about how places less than an hour’s drive away receive piped water for three days a week, saying ‘water is form God… next to the well and you die of thirst’. 

 In the nearby Madaba plains, a powerful landowner and tribal leader pays a well-regarded construction firm to sink an illegal well, to sell water to nearby farms and to private tanker drivers, and to irrigate his fruit trees. In the sprawling informal suburbs of East Amman a family displaced from Palestine struggles to afford to be connected to the semi-privatised water system, relying instead on an unofficial connection to a neighbour’s pipe, put in illegally by a plumber. They discuss how their own subversions pale against the scale of water abuses they imagine to be carried out by agri-businesses in rural areas, and by large tribal landowners. A few kilometres away in West Amman, a wealthy family with young children who have used up their water tanks before their next window of mains water piping get in contact with a local security guard who manages a contact network of people able to 'get things done', often in the shadow of official processes.  He puts them in touch with a tanker company, who may well draw from wells like that being sunk by the Madaba landowner. In a glassy West Amman office, a water consultant with a background in Engineering, part of a surge of new water-based initiatives, shrugs in exasperation at the unknowability of how and why so-called ‘non-revenue water’ is disappearing from the piped system, officially estimated to constitute about 50-60% of the total supply, maintaining that socio-economic factors are beyond his remit but speculating about poor residents of supposedly lawless East Amman and rural tribal areas like Dhiban. Scarcity though, he says, cannot be tackled through better management along, but is only amenable to supply-side solutions from vast new engineering and desalination projects, deferred to eve more distant future dates. 

As water scarcity gains traction as a globalised element of anthropogenic climate change,  and as it comes to be a defining  cause célèbre  in Jordan (widely said to be the second most water-poor country in the world) and a vital tool for attracting development aid and investment, questions of accessing, distributing and using water have become increasingly politically contentious. Tensions emerge between water used for irrigation and for domestic consumption, and water given over for domestic use by the ever-larger population of the capital –host to several million refugees– and that reserved for regions from which it is pumped. While grand hydropolitical discourses and schemes abound around global environmental change, transboundary water diplomacy, demographic explosions and the merits of various megaprojects, the everyday hydropolitics of water distribution and usage remains obscured. My research, which moves between the restive and economically marginalised rural region of Dhiban, and areas of the capital, Amman, seeks to centre these realities and experiences, exploring ethnographically how different people and places are bought into relation with each other and with the state through water infrastructures.  

All of these people and settings are brought into often contested relationships with each other by Jordan’s relatively recent but constantly unravelling water infrastructure. Starting from my long-term ethnographic engagement with Dhiban and Jabal Bani Hamida, my recent fieldwork has expanded outwards to the people and places, who are, in part, drinking the water taken from the Wala. I am working with a Jordanian postgraduate student and local community development organisations to understand domestic experiences of water, as well as with water policy makers and officials at different scales, to trace the contested flows of water in Jordan, as it self-defines as one of the world’s most water-poor nations. I look at ideas around the ethics of distribution, and of economic and environmental justice in these different settings, and how they emerge from and also reproduce different mediated relations with and through water infrastructure. Water, with its materiality and promise of quantifiability, seems to offer the possibility of materialising and substantiating long-felt but abstract relations of moral economy with the capital and its elites, in ways which tap into national and globalised water and environmental discourses which seem apolitical, in this way mirroring earlier discourses of corruption. Through this ethnographic material, I argue that water by its nature tends to resist legibility and calculability, but also to bring attention to ethical and political issues of distribution and flows that bring people into relation. 

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Protest in the face of catastrophe: Extinction Rebellion and the anti-politics of grief

Seagrave, Jacob (2023) Protest in the face of catastrophe: Extinction Rebellion and the anti-politics of grief. Suomen Antropologi, 47 (2). 49 - 73. ISSN 0355-3930

• Scopus publication

Extinction Rebellion (XR) is a novel environmental movement formed in 2018 which uses non-violent civil disobedience to communicate the catastrophic severity of anthropogenic climate change, protest for urgent action to be taken by governments to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025, and advocate for the establishment of a Citizens’ Assembly to lead government policy on climate justice. This dissertation serves as a general ethnographic account of the movement and specifically analyses the process by which activists construct, sustain and perform their subjectivities through the use of grief and work of mourning. By exploring this complex process and the New Age outlook which informs it, in both the setting of a retreat workshop and street protests, I argue that XR activists are doomsayers who express and authenticate the truth of climate catastrophe through the performance of their own grieving subjectivities. I suggest in turn that this approach constitutes a highly emotive and humanistic form of anti-politics orientated towards the articulation of the truth against ‘the system’.

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MSc Anthropology and Development

• Graduate taught
• Department of Anthropology
• Application code Y2UB
• Starting 2024
• Home full-time: Open
• Home part-time: Open
• Overseas full-time: Open
• Location: Houghton Street, London

Anthropology and development are tightly entwined: this programme brings together essential elements of both. It combines crucial anthropological insights into – and critiques of – economic globalisation and social transformation with the study of theories about development: both historical experiences and cutting-edge policy debates. 

This programme is offered by the Department of Anthropology with the assistance of the Department of International Development. 

The core Anthropology components of the programme offer you a comprehensive study of how anthropologists, from their unique vantage point, have understood globalisation and other economic transformations, as well as giving crucial insights into how they evaluate, criticise and contribute to development. Focusing on both 'Big D' development (schemes of improvement or projects) and 'little d' development (change which occurs as the result of economic growth or modernisation), the programme shows you how anthropologists have both changed practices from within as well as critiqued them from the outside. It also provides anthropological insights into new forms of production, consumption, exchange and financial circulation that have emerged since the 1980s.

The core International Development component of the programme provides you with key insights into the processes involved in overcoming poverty and creating healthy, wealthy and sustainable social change. The programme uses the latest theory in the social sciences to understand the processes, policy and practice of development.

Programme details

For more information about tuition fees and entry requirements, see the fees and funding and assessing your application sections.

Entry requirements

Minimum entry requirements for msc anthropology and development.

Upper second class honours (2:1) degree or equivalent in any discipline, with a genuine interest in anthropology and development, and areas of overlap between the two.

Competition for places at the School is high. This means that even if you meet the minimum entry requirement, this does not guarantee you an offer of admission.

If you have studied or are studying outside of the UK then have a look at our  Information for International Students  to find out the entry requirements that apply to you.

Assessing your application

We welcome applications from all suitably qualified prospective students and want to recruit students with the very best academic merit, potential and motivation, irrespective of their background.

We carefully consider each application on an individual basis, taking into account all the information presented on your application form, including your:

- academic achievement (including predicted and achieved grades) - statement of academic purpose - two academic references - CV

See further information on supporting documents

You may also have to provide evidence of your English proficiency, although you do not need to provide this at the time of your application to LSE.  See our English language requirements .

When to apply

Applications for this programme are considered on a rolling basis, meaning the programme will close once it becomes full. There is no fixed deadline by which you need to apply, however, to be considered for any LSE funding opportunity, you must have submitted your application and all supporting documents by the funding deadline. See the fees and funding section for more details.

Fees and funding

Every graduate student is charged a fee for their programme.

The fee covers registration and examination fees payable to the School, lectures, classes and individual supervision, lectures given at other colleges under intercollegiate arrangements and, under current arrangements, membership of the Students' Union. It does not cover living costs or travel or fieldwork.

Tuition fees 2024/25 for MSc Anthropology and Development

Home students: £17,424  Overseas students: £27,480

The Table of Fees shows the latest tuition amounts for all programmes offered by the School.

The amount of tuition fees you will need to pay, and any financial support you are eligible for, will depend on whether you are classified as a home or overseas student, otherwise known as your fee status. LSE assesses your fee status based on guidelines provided by the Department of Education.

Further information about fee status classification.

Fee reductions and rewards

Students who completed undergraduate study at LSE and are beginning taught graduate study at the School are eligible for a  fee reduction  of around 10 per cent of the fee.

Please refer to the  Fees Office website  for updates.

Scholarships and other funding

The School recognises that the  cost of living in London  may be higher than in your home town or country, and we provide generous scholarships each year to home and overseas students.

This programme is eligible for needs-based awards from LSE, including the  Graduate Support Scheme ,  Master's Awards , and  Anniversary Scholarships . 

Selection for any funding opportunity is based on receipt of an offer for a place and submitting a Graduate Financial Support application, before the funding deadline. Funding deadline for needs-based awards from LSE:  25 April 2024 .

In addition to our needs-based awards, LSE also makes available scholarships for students from specific regions of the world and awards for students studying specific subject areas.  Find out more about financial support.

Government tuition fee loans and external funding

A postgraduate loan is available from the UK government for eligible students studying for a first master’s programme, to help with fees and living costs. Some other governments and organisations also offer tuition fee loan schemes.

Find out more about tuition fee loans

Further information

Fees and funding opportunities

Information for international students

LSE is an international community, with over 140 nationalities represented amongst its student body. We celebrate this diversity through everything we do.  

If you are applying to LSE from outside of the UK then take a look at our Information for International students . 

1) Take a note of the UK qualifications we require for your programme of interest (found in the ‘Entry requirements’ section of this page). 

2) Go to the International Students section of our website. 

3) Select your country. 

4) Select ‘Graduate entry requirements’ and scroll until you arrive at the information about your local/national qualification. Compare the stated UK entry requirements listed on this page with the local/national entry requirement listed on your country specific page.

Part-time study Part time study is only available for students who do not require a student visa.

Programme structure and courses

You will take a combination of compulsory and optional courses before submitting a dissertation.

(* denotes a half unit) 

Anthropology of Development * Explores how anthropologists have evaluated, criticised and contributed to development.

Either   Anthropology of Economy (1): Production and Exchange * Examines ‘the economy’ as an object of social scientific analysis and a domain of human action.  Or Anthropology of Economy (2): Transformation and Globalisation * Addresses topics on the anthropology of globalisation, exploring how scholars have understood new forms of production, consumption, exchange and financial circulation.

Either   Development: History, Theory and Policy Focuses on the major trends of development and change in modern history and interpretations of them in the social sciences; and contemporary economic and social theory and their bearing on the policy and practice of development. Or Key Issues in Development Studies * Provides an overview of the key issues and debates in international development. And Option to the value of a half unit from an approved list

Courses to the value of one unit from a range of options

Dissertation An independent research project of 10,000 words on an approved topic of your choice

For the most up-to-date list of optional courses please visit the relevant School Calendar page .

You must note, however, that while care has been taken to ensure that this information is up to date and correct, a change of circumstances since publication may cause the School to change, suspend or withdraw a course or programme of study, or change the fees that apply to it. The School will always notify the affected parties as early as practicably possible and propose any viable and relevant alternative options. Note that the School will neither be liable for information that after publication becomes inaccurate or irrelevant, nor for changing, suspending or withdrawing a course or programme of study due to events outside of its control, which includes but is not limited to a lack of demand for a course or programme of study, industrial action, fire, flood or other environmental or physical damage to premises.

You must also note that places are limited on some courses and/or subject to specific entry requirements. The School cannot therefore guarantee you a place. Please note that changes to programmes and courses can sometimes occur after you have accepted your offer of a place.  These changes are normally made in light of developments in the discipline or path-breaking research, or on the basis of student feedback. Changes can take the form of altered course content, teaching formats or assessment modes. Any such changes are intended to enhance the student learning experience. You should visit the School’s  Calendar , or contact the relevant academic department, for information on the availability and/or content of courses and programmes of study. Certain substantive changes will be listed on the  updated graduate course and programme information page.

Teaching and assessment

Contact hours and independent study.

The average taught course contact hours per half unit is 30 hours and per full unit is 60 hours. Scheduled teaching normally includes three hours of lectures and four to five hours of seminars per week (depending on the options selected), supplemented by academic tutorials. Hours vary according to courses and you can view indicative details in the Calendar  within the Teaching section of each course guide . You will need to take compulsory core courses and undertake examinations in June. Additionally you will be required to write an essay (dissertation) of not more than 10,000 words on an approved topic of your own choice, to be submitted in mid-September.

Given the high level of academic performance expected from students, you will need to undertake a significant amount of independent study to get the most out of the programme. You will manage the majority of your study time yourself, by engaging in activities such as reading, note-taking, thinking and research.

Teaching methods

LSE is internationally recognised for its teaching and research and therefore employs a rich variety of teaching staff with a range of experience and status. Courses may be taught by individual members of faculty, such as lecturers, senior lecturers, readers, associate professors and professors. Many departments now also employ guest teachers and visiting members of staff, LSE teaching fellows and graduate teaching assistants who are usually doctoral research students and in the majority of cases, teach on undergraduate courses only. You can view indicative details for the teacher responsible for each course in the relevant  course guide .

All taught courses are required to include formative coursework which is unassessed. It is designed to help prepare you for summative assessment which counts towards the course mark and to the degree award. LSE uses a range of formative assessment, such as essays, problem sets, case studies, reports, quizzes, mock exams and many others.

Summative assessment will include examinations and essays, including an essay (dissertation) of not more than 10,000 words on an approved topic of your own choice, which is submitted in late August. An indication of the formative coursework and summative assessment for each course can be found in the relevant  course guide .

Academic support

You will also be assigned an academic mentor who will be available for guidance and advice on academic or personal concerns.

There are many opportunities to extend your learning outside the classroom and complement your academic studies at LSE.  LSE LIFE  is the School’s centre for academic, personal and professional development. Some of the services on offer include: guidance and hands-on practice of the key skills you will need to do well at LSE: effective reading, academic writing and critical thinking; workshops related to how to adapt to new or difficult situations, including development of skills for leadership, study/work/life balance and preparing for the world of work; and advice and practice on working in study groups and on cross-cultural communication and teamwork.

LSE is committed to enabling all students to achieve their full potential and the School’s  Disability and Wellbeing Service  provides a free, confidential service to all LSE students and is a first point of contact for all disabled students.

Student support and resources

We’re here to help and support you throughout your time at LSE, whether you need help with your academic studies, support with your welfare and wellbeing or simply to develop on a personal and professional level.

Whatever your query, big or small, there are a range of people you can speak to who will be happy to help.  

Department librarians   – they will be able to help you navigate the library and maximise its resources during your studies. 

Accommodation service  – they can offer advice on living in halls and offer guidance on private accommodation related queries.

Class teachers and seminar leaders  – they will be able to assist with queries relating to specific courses. 

Disability and Wellbeing Service  – they are experts in long-term health conditions, sensory impairments, mental health and specific learning difficulties. They offer confidential and free services such as  student counselling,  a  peer support scheme  and arranging  exam adjustments.  They run groups and workshops.  

IT help  – support is available 24 hours a day to assist with all your technology queries.   

LSE Faith Centre  – this is home to LSE's diverse religious activities and transformational interfaith leadership programmes, as well as a space for worship, prayer and quiet reflection. It includes Islamic prayer rooms and a main space for worship. It is also a space for wellbeing classes on campus and is open to all students and staff from all faiths and none.   

Language Centre  – the Centre specialises in offering language courses targeted to the needs of students and practitioners in the social sciences. We offer pre-course English for Academic Purposes programmes; English language support during your studies; modern language courses in nine languages; proofreading, translation and document authentication; and language learning community activities.

LSE Careers  ­ – with the help of LSE Careers, you can make the most of the opportunities that London has to offer. Whatever your career plans, LSE Careers will work with you, connecting you to opportunities and experiences from internships and volunteering to networking events and employer and alumni insights. 

LSE Library   –   founded in 1896, the British Library of Political and Economic Science is the major international library of the social sciences. It stays open late, has lots of excellent resources and is a great place to study. As an LSE student, you’ll have access to a number of other academic libraries in Greater London and nationwide. 

LSE LIFE  – this is where you should go to develop skills you’ll use as a student and beyond. The centre runs talks and workshops on skills you’ll find useful in the classroom; offers one-to-one sessions with study advisers who can help you with reading, making notes, writing, research and exam revision; and provides drop-in sessions for academic and personal support. (See ‘Teaching and assessment’). 

LSE Students’ Union (LSESU)  – they offer academic, personal and financial advice and funding.  

PhD Academy   – this is available for PhD students, wherever they are, to take part in interdisciplinary events and other professional development activities and access all the services related to their registration. 

Sardinia House Dental Practice   – this   offers discounted private dental services to LSE students.  

St Philips Medical Centre  – based in Pethwick-Lawrence House, the Centre provides NHS Primary Care services to registered patients.

Student Services Centre  – our staff here can answer general queries and can point you in the direction of other LSE services.  

Student advisers   – we have a  Deputy Head of Student Services (Advice and Policy)  and an  Adviser to Women Students  who can help with academic and pastoral matters.

Student life

As a student at LSE you’ll be based at our central London campus. Find out what our campus and London have to offer you on academic, social and career perspective. 

Student societies and activities

Your time at LSE is not just about studying, there are plenty of ways to get involved in  extracurricular activities . From joining one of over 200 societies, or starting your own society, to volunteering for a local charity, or attending a public lecture by a world-leading figure, there is a lot to choose from. 

The campus 

LSE is based on one  campus  in the centre of London. Despite the busy feel of the surrounding area, many of the streets around campus are pedestrianised, meaning the campus feels like a real community. 

Life in London 

London is an exciting, vibrant and colourful city. It's also an academic city, with more than 400,000 university students. Whatever your interests or appetite you will find something to suit your palate and pocket in this truly international capital. Make the most of career opportunities and social activities, theatre, museums, music and more. 

Want to find out more? Read why we think  London is a fantastic student city , find out about  key sights, places and experiences for new Londoners . Don't fear, London doesn't have to be super expensive: hear about  London on a budget . 

Preliminary reading

H J Chang  Kicking Away the Ladder: development strategy in historical perspective (Anthem, 2002)

C Hann and K Hart Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique   (Polity, 2011)

K Gardner  Discordant Development: Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh   (Pluto, 2012)

K Gardner and D Lewis Anthropology, Development: twenty first century challenges   (Pluto, 2015)

A Kohli  State-Directed Development: political power and industrialization in the global periphery (Cambridge, 2004)

A Sen  Development as Freedom (Anchor, 1999)

Quick Careers Facts for the Department of Anthropology

Median salary of our PG students 15 months after graduating: £28,000

Top 5 sectors our students work in:

• Government, Public Sector and Policy   
• Financial and Professional Services              
• FMCG, Manufacturing and Retail              
• Advertising, Marketing, PR Media, Entertainment, Publishing and Journalism           
• Recruitment and Employment Activities

The data was collected as part of the Graduate Outcomes survey, which is administered by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). Graduates from 2020-21 were the fourth group to be asked to respond to Graduate Outcomes. Median salaries are calculated for respondents who are paid in UK pounds sterling and who were working in full-time employment.

The programme provides ideal preparation for research work in anthropology, international development and related fields. 

Further information on graduate destinations for this programme

Support for your career 

Many leading organisations give careers presentations at the School during the year, and LSE Careers has a wide range of resources available to assist students in their job search. Find out more about the  support available to students through LSE Careers

Find out more about LSE

Discover more about being an LSE student - meet us in a city near you, visit our campus or experience LSE from home. 

Experience LSE from home

Webinars, videos, student blogs and student video diaries will help you gain an insight into what it's like to study at LSE for those that aren't able to make it to our campus.  Experience LSE from home . 

Come on a guided campus tour, attend an undergraduate open day, drop into our office or go on a self-guided tour.  Find out about opportunities to visit LSE . 

LSE visits you

Student Marketing, Recruitment and Study Abroad travels throughout the UK and around the world to meet with prospective students. We visit schools, attend education fairs and also hold Destination LSE events: pre-departure events for offer holders.  Find details on LSE's upcoming visits . 

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This thesis is based on field research conducted in Moscow in 1992-1993. It addresses a theoretical literature on urbanism, and examines the consumption and interpretation of space by urban social actors. The hypothesis is that a particular social context, in this case a post-Soviet city, can only be understood by examining the meanings of the city as these are constructed by its inhabitants. It is an analysis of the ways in which these meanings are constructed through practical experience as people consume things, spaces, and interactive moments as they move through the city in pursuit of individually intended, cooperatively negotiated and institutionally directed projects. It is suggested that the resultant meanings are the product of partial and contingent knowledge, of interpretations of the physical landscapes of the city, and of the socio-emotive face to face interactions that characterise distinctive places and spaces in the city. The thesis is also concerned with elucidating the nature of social change in the specific context of post-Soviet transition. The transition to the Market is examined through analysis of the ideas and practices of the city's inhabitants. The thesis concludes with an examination of the differences between Soviet urbanism and the urbanisms described by authors interested in cities of the capitalist world. These differences and their effects on urban culture, are imported to give a sense to the ways in which Muscovites consume and interpret the new socio-economic phenomena which attend the transition period. The thesis attempts to elucidate the links between abstract and changing social, political and economic forces and their operationalisation in everyday life. I argue that attention to the interactive moment illuminates the point of articulation between structural forces and embodied or internalised identity. These moments are cued by the specifics of different socio-spatial contexts, which in turn inform the ways in which social actors interact with and construct the meaning of post-Soviet urbanism.

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AN497 Dissertation: MSc in Social Anthropology (Religion in the Contemporary World)

Course info, fetching learning content....

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Dr Oliver Crawford

January 4th, 2022, book review: underground asia: global revolutionaries and the assault on empire by tim harper.

0 comments | 15 shares

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

In Underground Asia , Tim Harper explores the intensifying anti-colonial activity across South, Southeast and East Asia that sought to undermine empire ‘from below’ in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Weaving together an amazing array of sources into a memorable and exciting narrative and offering a fresh perspective on familiar events, this is a brilliantly realised work of history, finds Oliver Crawford . 

This book  r eview is published by the  LSE Southeast Asia blog  and  LSE  R eview of Books  as part of a collaborative series focusing on timely and important social science books from and about Southeast Asia.

Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire.  Tim Harper.  Penguin. 2020.

The tumultuous years of the Second World War and its aftermath loom large in standard accounts of Asian decolonisation. Tim Harper and Chris Bayly covered this ground themselves in  Forgotten Armies  (2004) and  Forgotten Wars   (2007). In his magisterial new book,  Underground Asia   (2020) ,  Harper switches focus to the opening decades of the twentieth century (around 1905-27), from the closing years of Europe’s  belle epoque  to the jazz age, when, he says, European empires in Asia were ‘fundamentally undermined from below’. These were the years of the First World War and the October Revolution. They were also, as Harper shows, a time of intensifying anti-colonial activity across South, Southeast and East Asia, when assassinations, mutinies, strikes and ‘native’ uprisings caused European officials to fear that the colonial order in Asia might be on the verge of unravelling altogether.

Central to imperial officials’ fears in these years was a new kind of colonial subject: widely travelled, educated in the European style (generally fluent in several languages), well-versed in modern political creeds such as anarchism and Marxism, connected to various international cultural and political networks and implacably hostile to foreign rule. Harper introduces us to many figures of this kind: the Indians Har Dayal, M.P.T. Acharya and M.N. Roy; the Indonesians Semaun and Tan Malaka; and the Vietnamese Phan Boi Chau and Nguyen Ai Quoc. It is this cast of Asian radicals – as opposed to the more familiar pantheon of Asian national leaders, such as Gandhi, Nehru, Mao and Sukarno – whose stories Harper tells in  Underground Asia .

Image Credit: Photo by  uji kanggo gumilang  on  Unsplash

The book itself is structured chronologically. The first five chapters span the years 1905-14, when the underground took shape. This happened mainly  not  in colonial Asia itself but in the cities of Britain, France, Japan, China and the United States, where various Asian anti-colonialists lived, worked, studied and interacted, learning from one another and coming to see ‘Asia’ as a single field of anti-colonial struggle. Chapters Six to Nine cover the First World War, an event that opened new possibilities for resisting imperialism in Asia. At first, certain Indian radicals saw Germany as a promising partner in the struggle against British rule. It was the October Revolution, though, and above all Lenin’s support for Asian ‘national movements’, that transformed the Asian underground. As described in Chapters Ten to Thirteen, communist parties began to form in Asia from 1920, while Asian anti-colonialists such as M.N. Roy, Tan Malaka and Nguyen Ai Quoc soon travelled to Moscow and began engaging (often critically) with the Communist International (Comintern).

The story reaches its climax in Chapter Fourteen, with the National Revolutionary Army’s 1926 Northern Expedition in China and the 1926-27 communist uprisings in Java and Sumatra. Both events, though charged with the promise of emancipation, rapidly descended into bloodshed, ending with a purge of communists in China and the mass execution, arrest and exile of rebels in Indonesia. After 1927, in Harper’s view, there was something of a changing of the guard. A new set of anti-imperialists came to prominence, more committed to party discipline and more nationalist in their politics. With the exception of Nguyen Ai Quoc (better known today as Ho Chi Minh), the careers of those in the underground ended in failure. M.N. Roy was not at the centre of India’s transition to independence. Tan Malaka was killed by political enemies in the Indonesian Republican Army in 1949, in the last months of the Indonesian Revolution. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Java and all but written out of his country’s history during the long reign of the anti-communist General Suharto (1966-98).

Two themes come out strongly from Harper’s account. First, the quality of the everyday life of anti-colonialists – sometimes exciting and even inspiring; often lonely, poor, cold and insecure, lived in fear of deportation or imprisonment by colonial police. Several memorable phrases capture the mood of life in the underground: ‘the world, steerage class’; ‘rebels in rubber soles’; ‘the country of the lost’. The second recurring theme is a sense of the underground’s characteristic politics. These were often ideologically eclectic and tinged with utopianism, from the anarchism of Acharya to the Islamic-communism of Semaun. They were also pervaded by an air of cosmopolitanism, both in the sense that the figures from the underground were often polyglots who drew omnivorously on world culture, and in the stronger sense that they often dreamed a post-imperial future when the world would dispense with the borders violently established by centuries of European imperialism.

I have two criticisms of  Underground Asia . The first relates to whether the underground really did ‘undermine’ European rule in Asia, as Harper claims. Looking at Indonesia, in 1927 European rule was still firmly in place across the archipelago. Indeed, as a result of the failed 1926-27 uprisings in Java and Sumatra, it would be buttressed further by new police and censorship powers. It was not until the Japanese defeat of the Dutch in 1942 and subsequent occupation of Indonesia (1942-45) that the real tipping point came for the Indonesian independence struggle.

My second criticism concerns political violence. Harper acknowledges that Tan Malaka, not uniquely among the figures discussed in the book, saw violence as ‘a revolutionary necessity’. He also argues, however, that Tan Malaka believed Dutch rule might be ended by ‘the suborning of military garrisons, the solidarity of general stoppages, the unstoppable momentum and moral force of mass demonstration’ (543). Undoubtedly Tan Malaka  hoped  that violence might not be necessary to end foreign rule, but surely understood that ‘moral force’ alone was unlikely to be sufficient. In his writings he was fulsome in his praise of the Bolsheviks and, later, the Chinese Communists under Mao, neither of whom shied away from violent (and highly authoritarian) methods of achieving their political goals. This ought to remind us that the politics of the Asian underground, though focused on emancipation, had a darker side – one that Harper might have dwelt on longer.

These caveats aside,  Underground Asia  is a brilliantly realised work of history. It weaves together an amazing array of sources into a memorable and exciting narrative, offering a fresh perspective on familiar events and bringing to life a cast of historical actors who are too often forgotten in their own national histories.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

About the author

Oliver Crawford completed his PhD at University of Cambridge in 2019 with a thesis on 'The Political Thought of Tan Malaka'. He has subsequently held a research fellowship at ILAS and a guest teaching position at LSE.

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