Goldsmiths - University of London

Professor Pat Caplan MA PhD

My interests have included gender and social inequality; food, health and risk; reflexivity and anthropological ethics; social justice and human rights; personal narratives and biography, and I have carried out fieldwork on Mafia Island, Tanzania since 1965, Chennai (Madras) since 1974, and West Wales since 1992.

Keynote lectures

• 2009. 'Changing Swahili cultures in a globalising world: An approach from anthropology’ Keynote lecture for conference ‘Cultural Dynamics of Pre-colonial and Colonial Swahili society’ Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Korea, May 14-15th 2009
• 2006. 'But is it real food? Responses to globalisation in Tanzania and India. Keynote for the SCOFF panel of the BSA Annual Conference on Order and Disorder, Harrogate, April.
• 2005. 'Towards a feminist ethics of anthropology' Keynote lecture for LOVA (Gender and Anthropology) conference 10th June 2005, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands
• 2003. 'Anthropology in the new world (dis)order' Keynote lecture at the Annual Conference of South African Anthropologists, University of Cape Town, South Africa, 24th Aug. 2003. (pdf of lecture)
• 2002. 'Anthropology as a moral discipline: social justice, ethics and human rights' Keynote lecture at the Canadian Anthropology Society Conference, 'Social justice, culture and power' University of Windsor, Canada. (pdf of lecture)
• 2001. Paul Stirling Memorial Lecture, University of Kent. Feb. 14th. 'Risky Business: Changing Landscapes of Anthropology'

Research interests

Recent Research Projects

• UK: Concepts of Healthy Eating (in the UK)
  1. Phase I (Lewisham)
  2. Phase II (West Wales)

  all of the data from the ESRC food projects has now been archived in the
  ESDS ESRC Qualidata Archive

• Tanzania: Local Understandings of Global Processes: Food as a Vehicle of and Metaphor for Modernity on Mafia Island
  
  
• India: Changes in Food Consumption Patterns in Middle-Class Households in Chennai (Madras), India
  

Interview for the 'Anthropological Ancestors' Archive

I was one of the founding members of the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths. I was recently interviewed by Alan Macfarlane for the Web archive on anthropologists. In the clip I talk about the founding of the Department and its beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s.
[ Listen to the interview (requires QuickTime) ]

• Interview for archive Pioneers of Social Research

Current projects

• A web site on and for Mafia Island, Tanzania
• Historical photo gallery of Mafia Island
• Writing a historical biography of a man from Mafia Island, Tanzania
• Photo gallery of pictures from the Far Western Hills of Nepal, taken in 1969
• Archiving of textual, photographic and audio material from Mafia Island, Tanzania' for the British Library (Digital archive of music recordings made on Mafia Island in the 1960s - pdf) and the School of Oriental and African Studies

Selected publications

Early books were on social inequality (including gender, caste, and class), kinship, and sexuality, and were based on fieldwork on Mafia Island Tanzania (1965-7, 1976, 1984, 1994, 2002, 2004), in the Far Western Hills of Nepal (1969), and in Madras (later Chennai) city (1974-5, 1981-2, 1987, 1991, 1996, 1998).

Selected Publications

• The Ethics of Anthropology: Debates and Dilemmas (ed.). London and New York Routledge 2003.
  
  
• Swahili Modernities: Identity, Power and Development on the East African Coast (ed. with F. Topan) Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press 2004.
  
  
• Risk Revisited (ed). Pluto Press: London. 2000
  
  
• African Voices, African Lives; Personal Narratives from a Swahili Village. Routledge. 1997
  
  
• Food, Health and Identity (ed) Routledge 1997

Publications about Pat Caplan

• 2003. Hour-long interview with Alan Macfarlane for Anthropological Ancestors video archive.


• 2004. L. Back. ‘Pat Caplan’ in V. Amit (ed.) Biographical Dictionary of Social And Cultural Anthropology London and New York: Routledge


• 2009. Interview with Paul Thompson in series ‘Pioneers of Research: National Life Stories’ for the British Library Sound Archives 181109.