Topic description and stories

A feather in your cap: inside the symbolic universe of Renaissance Europe

02 Nov 2017

Today, feathers are an extravagant accessory in fashion; 500 years ago, however, they were used to constitute culture, artistry, good health and even...

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Flamenco by Veyis Polat (cropped)

Flamenco: what happens when a grassroots musical genre becomes a marker of culture

18 Aug 2016

What happens when a musical genre becomes an identifier for a region? In his book Flamenco, Regionalism and Musical Heritage in Southern Spain ...

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Why be human when you can be otherkin?

16 Jul 2016

As social beings, a sense of identity plays an important role in our relations – and in our own happiness. But identity doesn’t have to be narrowly...

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Traffic in Ulaanbaator

Mongolia: unravelling the troubled narratives of a nation

27 Feb 2015

In two separate books, anthropologists Dr Franck Billé and Dr Christopher Kaplonski look at the identity of Mongolia, a country that stands at a...

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Dancing at the opening of a stupa in Shatta village

Creating a shared resource for the endangered culture of the Kalmyks

21 Sep 2014

Almost four centuries ago, ancestors of the Kalmyk people trekked across central Asia to form a Buddhist nation on the edge of Europe. Today Kalmyk...

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I’ve been working like a dog: revisiting a 1960s study of the working class

10 Jul 2014

The Beatles' song A Hard Day’s Night was released 50 years ago today. Its runaway success in the charts overlapped with a major sociological study of...

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Case de Juntas, Gernika

Cultural heritage after conflict

01 May 2010

A collaborative study led by Cambridge is examining the impact on society of the destruction and reconstruction of cultural heritage.

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