Margherita Margiotti
Dr Margherita Margiotti
BA (Hon.) Anthropology (Siena), PhD Social Anthropology (St Andrews)
Teaching Fellow in Social AnthropologyDepartment of Archaeology and Anthropology |
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Research Interests
- Kinship and Marriage, Gender, Notions of the Person, Exchange, Reproduction, Sociality
- Ethnography, Ontologies, Feminism, Psychoanalysis
- The New Anthropology of Kinship, New Reproductive Technologies, Genetic Engineering
- Anthropology of Greater Amazonia, Panama, the Kuna
I came to the University of Bristol in 2010, after obtaining my PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews (2010). I specialize in the ethnography of Greater Amazonian indigenous societies and my research has been with Kuna people of the San Blas Archipelago (Eastern Panama) where I lived and carried out extensive fieldwork. While I have an abiding interest in the comparative study of Lowland Central and South American indigenous people, I recently became interested in the anthropology of Britain and in the cross-cultural study of reproduction and relatedness in the light of biotechnological advances and under different ontological, historical, cultural and socio-economic conditions.
Teaching Interests
At Bristol I have designed and delivered new option units like ‘Kinship and Marriage’ and ‘The Anthropology of Greater Amazonia’ for undergraduate students. I have also delivered core units at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including ‘Contemporary Theories in Social Anthropology’, ‘Research Methods in Social Anthropology’, ‘Anthropological and Archaeological Field Schools’, and I convened the team-taught unit ‘Advanced Issues in Anthropology and Archaeology’.
Supervision Areas
I welcome students to work on topics related to my research and teaching areas.
Current and Past Research Projects
- Living in Density: Kinship, Intimacy and the Person in San Blas
Research on the dense and nucleated character of Kuna villages has shaped my doctoral dissertation on the visual, the material and the relational aspects of Kuna everyday life. Analysing Kuna notions of sociality, kinship and the person, my work explores the intimacy and the intricacies of living together in socio-spatial density and how notions of the person and social relations are generated within this setting. The monograph emerging from my dissertation (provisionally titled ‘Living in Density: Kinship, Intimacy and the Person in San Blas’) builds on Levi-Strauss’ notion of symbolic saturation and Gregory Bateson’s and Margaret Mead’s notion of density. My book sheds light into the multiple scales of Kuna density expressed in the village plan, in the material culture, as well as in the productive and reproductive processes of making persons and places from a distinctive Kuna perspective.
- Contested Embryos: a Cross-Cultural Study in Kinship, Time, Emergent Life and Biotechnologies
How do different UK publics reconcile their knowledge about species boundaries and the integrity of the human with the novel potentialities offered by biosciences and genetic engineering? I am developing a new project to conduct research on ideas surrounding hybrid animal/human embryos from a cross-cultural perspective. The research aims at producing an innovative study where biosciences and genetic engineering are brought together in a cross-cultural framework with non-Western cultural logics on reproduction (e.g. Amazonian). The latter also invest animal/human embryos with multiple significances but consider humanity as a project whose achievement takes longer than physiological reproduction or the time of gestation.
- Biomedical Interventions on Maternity in Panama City
I am also developing a project on medical pluralism, reproductive rights and the interface between reproductive medicine and people’s knowledge/practices of reproduction in the context of low-income, black and indigenous Panamanian population served by the Hospital del Niño (Panama City).
Publications
Margiotti, Margherita, Gow Peter (2012), Is There Fortune in Greater Amazonia? In Da Col, Giovanni, and Humphrey, Caroline (eds), Economies of Fortune: Luck, Vitalities and the Contingencies of Daily Life, Social Analysis, Special Issues 1-2.
Margiotti, Margherita, Gow Peter (2012), Is There Fortune in Greater Amazonia? Da Col, Giovanni, and Humphrey, Caroline (eds), Economies of Fortune: Luck, Vitalities and the Contingencies of Daily Life, Berghahn Press.
Margiotti, Margherita (in prep), Conceiving Hybrid Embryos: Relatedness and Animal-Human Relations among the San Blas Kuna, Eastern Panama.
Margiotti, Margherita (in prep), Making Kinship through Magic: Violence and Intimacy.
Margiotti, Margherita (monograph in prep), Living in Density: Kinship, Intimacy and the Person in San Blas, (tentative title).