Professor David Parkin

Socio-cultural anthropology with reference to eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean littoral, with reference to religion, especially Islam, economic development, cross-cultural semantics, material culture and social evolution, and healing traditions.

University of Oxford

Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography

Research interests

• Islam and medicine, with particular reference to Swahili-speaking
  peoples of East Africa.
• Ethnography and history of the Swahili-speaking peoples of East
  Africa.
• The relationship of language development and the expression of the
  senses and emotions cross-culturally and in human evolution.
• The development of a new materiality in anthropology (from objects
  to human density and scale).
• Medical anthropology and the interpenetration of the social and the
  biological (with Elisabeth Hsu and Stanley Ulijaszek respectively).
• Indian Ocean studies (with Zulfikar Hirji).
• Human fertility and reproduction (with Soraya Tremayne).
• The Interactive Mind (on the developing human interrelationships of
  mind, body and objects with Nigel Thrift, Chris Gosden and others).

Current (with Max-Planck-Institute, Goettingen, Germany): medical diversity