Dr. Syeedda Anjum Ara Alvi

Biography

Anjum Alvi, a cultural anthropologist, joined LUMS as an Asisstant Professor in December 2008. She received her PhD in 1999 from the Free University of Berlin, Germany. She taught for 18 years at the same institute. Parallel to this she taught several courses at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg as well as at the Institute of Sociology of the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. Her PhD thesis "Bearers of Grief: Death, Women, Gifts, and Kinship in Muslim Punjab" involves a comparative theoretical discussion of the perspectives of Pierre Bourdieu and Louis Dumont and their analytical approaches to kinship which she utilized to approach the social condition of the Pakistani Punjab. The thesis focuses on marriage, the brother-sister relationship, gender relations, gift-exchange and the concept of gift, exemplified most extensively by the mortuary ritual. Her three essays on the Punjab appeared in leading international journals like Social Anthropology (the notion of the Punjabi selfhood and personhood), Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute (the Punjabi kinship and its place in the South Asian context), andCurrent Anthropology (the concept of the Muslim veiling). Her fourth essay on the Punjab, to be submitted, analyzes the different forms of gifts in the Punjab within a South Asian context as well as in relation to a general notion of ethics.

Research Interest

anthropology