• University of Edinburgh
• School of Social and Political Studies

Social Anthropology

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Research Interests

• anthropology of science, technology and medicine
• anthropology of food
• farming systems
• technologies of everyday life
• gender systems past and present
  
• China and East Asia; California; Europe

PhD Supervision

I welcome enquiries from students interested in any of my research fields. Currently and recently supervised PhD topics include:

• "The edible landscape: science, farming and sustainability in NW Portugal";
• "Weill-Cornell Medical College in Qatar: an anthropological study";
• "The war will go, but the war will stay: land, landmines and livelihoods in Northwest Cambodia";
  
• "Barefoot technologies: an ethnographic study of learning and skill development in Rajasthan, India";
• "'To see the world in a grain of rice' -- contesting China's GE rice commercialisation, risk construction and policy-making";
  
• "Hacked: the restructuring of the international IT workforce";
• "Constructions of depression in the USA";
• "Delights in farm guest-houses: Nongjiale tourism, rural development, and the regime of leisure-pleasure in post-Mao China";
• "Reforming the child: childhood, citizenship and subjectivity in contemporary China".
  

Biographical statement

I began my research career working on the history of agriculture and of science, technology and medicine in China. After a wonderful year of ethnographic fieldwork, which I spent in Kelantan, Malaysia splashing through the mud of paddy-fields and learning from farmers how they negotiated the challenges of Green Revolution technology, I expanded my interests to anthropology and issues of rural development. More recently, through my interest in the macro- and micro-politics of everyday technologies (including food, housing, communications and hygiene), I have become involved in collaborative projects, including research and the co-supervising of postgraduates, not only with anthropologists, historians and development studies scholars, but also with STS scholars.

I have had research and teaching posts at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, at the CNRS in Paris, in the department of Anthropology at UCLA, at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, and most lately in the department of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. I have conducted fieldwork and archival research in China, Taiwan, Malaysia and California, and in 1986 I spent a year in Korea as Visiting Professor of Anthropology

My publications include: the volume on Agriculture in the series Science and Civilisation in China (1984); The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (1986; 1994); Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (1997); Technology and Society in Ming China, 1368-1644 (2000); and the co-edited volume on China in Enciclopedia della historia della scienza (2001). I have also recently published on genetically modified crops, on spatial practices and on sustainable landscapes; The Warp and the Weft, a collection on techniques of visual representation in China, was published by Brill in 2007. Gender and Technology, a review article comparing anthropological and STS perspectives, is available in the Annual Review of Anthropology (36) 2007. I have just guest-edited a special issue of the new journal East Asian Science, Technology & Society (Dec 2008) entitled 'Constructing intimacy: technology, family and gender in East Asia'. I am currently working on a study of the micro- and macro-politics of domestic technologies in California, tentatively entitled The Tomato, the Telephone and the Toilet, and am developing a comparative research project on the theme of "technological cultures".

For more on my research and teaching interests, and for my online study of California's toilet culture, see http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/bray/; for an online presentation of current work of the domestication of information technologies see under January 16, 2004 on http://www.cits.ucsb.edu/video_fls_03-04.htm.

Selected Publications