Istvan Praet

Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology

Istvan teaches anthropology at Durham University. He holds a doctorate in Social Anthropology from Oxford University and previously worked at the Laboratoire d’anthopologie sociale in Paris, at Cambridge University, in London (Roehampton) and Munich (LMU). While Istvan has a dual interest in Western and non-Western forms of knowledge, his doctoral research in the early 2000s was based on ethnographic fieldwork with Chachi people in Esmeraldas, NW Ecuador. He has published on Amerindian forms of ritual and shamanism and on indigenous notions of metamorphosis and catastrophe. His monograph, Animism and the Question of Life (2013, Routledge) is a comparative study of “animistic” conceptions of humanity and life. More recently, he has developed an interest in outer space studies (the emerging field of research that investigates extraterrestrial endeavours from social scientific and humanities angles). Indigenous perspectives on outer space are one aspect of this new interest. Another emerging interest pertains to indigenous data sovereignty in the context of planetary and astronomical research but also in the context of the current AI boom.

Read more about Istvan and his work here.