Dr Thomas Strong

Biography

I received my BA in anthropology from Reed College in 1994. My BA thesis analysed the sociocultural significance of blood supplies, focusing especially on HIV risk and blood donor eligibility guidelines. As a staff research associate at the University of California in the 1990s, I conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork with gay youth on the streets of San Francisco, looking closely at social knowledge related to sex and HIV. An abiding interest in the sociocultural symbolism of blood and body drew me to the ethnography of Melanesia. Fieldwork in 2000-01 & 2003 in highland Papua New Guinea focused on changing forms of gender, personhood, and exchange in the context of modernity. Highlanders often interpret their experience of colonialism and Christian conversion through images bodily diminishment, decaying vitality, and the increased danger of witchcraft, changes summed up in a powerful contemporary cultural motif: the idea that men's bodies are shrinking. I completed a PhD in anthropology at Princeton University in 2004. After lecturing for two years at the University of Helsinki, I came to Maynooth in 2008. For three years I worked closely with the Combat Diseases of Poverty Consortium and with East African students and colleagues to build capacity for social research on health and illness in the developing world. I have since returned to a sustained focus on highland Papua New Guinea, conducting major fieldwork in 2013 and 2014 on contemporary witchcraft phenomena and how these express the disappointed promises of modernity. Since 2009 I have been active in NGO and activist organisations in Dublin responding to the HIV crisis in Ireland.

Research Interest

Anthropology