Caroline Humphrey

Biographic Data

ID3590487
NAMECaroline Humphrey
GIVEN NAMESCaroline
FAMILY NAMEHumphrey
SIGNATUREHUMPHREY C
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Cambridge
ORCID0009-0008-7005-4924
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS125
TOTAL CITATIONS918
AUTHOR COUNT119
EDITOR COUNT6
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1973
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX15

  • An Appreciation from England of Roberte Hamayon and her Work

    Open AccessCaroline HumphreyARTICLEL Homme2026

    En el ecosistema mediático de redes, plataformas y dispositivos conectados, la tecnología deja de ser un simple instrumento racional para convertirse en un operador de encantamiento colectivo. Las interacciones digitales —memes, emojis, avatares, flujos visuales y prácticas participativas— constituyen, por lo tanto, los rituales de una socialidad emocional basada menos en la opinión pública que en lo que podríamos llamar una emoción pública. Desd…

  • Shifting spatial metaphors in Russia at a time of war

    Open AccessFranck Billé, Caroline HumphreyARTICLETerritory Politics Governance2024References: 11

    Russia's war with Ukraine is reshaping Russia's geopolitical orientation and transforming the ways the country relates to its immediate neighbours. In this article, rather than undertaking a geopolitical analysis of the consequences inside Russia of the ongoing war in Ukraine, we look at public discourse as one aspect of political activity. We describe how processes of a holistic kind are depicted in metaphors and how new spatial metaphors are em…

  • Rethinking Authority in China’s Border Regime: Regulating the Irregular

    Caroline HumphreyARTICLEThe China Journal2024

  • Invisible Sovereigns: Dialogues in the Russian-Buryat Colonial Encounter

    Open AccessCaroline HumphreyARTICLEInner Asia2024References: 2

    This article analyses the various discursive interactions through which the Russian sovereign and its power have been presented to, received by, and independently conceptualised by the Buryats in the imperial and Soviet periods. It uses the notion of 'invisibility' as a starting point to explore the ways in which the space created by a mutual lack of knowledge was 'filled in' by presentations of the self by both sides. The result, it is argued, w…

  • Displacement and the Natal Paradise: The Metamorphosis of Placenta Burial Rites in Buryat and Mongol Lands

    Open AccessCaroline HumphreyARTICLEL Homme2024Cited by: 2References: 24

    This article has two related aims: first to bring to attention an important, but neglected, element of Mongolian and Buryat social relations, those arising around birth and birthplaces. The ritual burial of the placenta creates a birth site attributed with vital force, and this is held to 'revivify' throughout their lives not only the child born but also the biological descendants of that child. It is argued that a theoretical perspective focusse…

  • Intuitive districts: Agentive images in a post-socialist city

    Open AccessCaroline HumphreyARTICLECity & Society2024References: 16

    Anyone who has lived in a city knows that, separately from the administrative or electoral districts, there are districts that exist in the imagination. Areas of the city seem to have a distinctive character and ethos. The article suggests that such notional place-forming occurs spontaneously through everyday sensations, life activities, and events and is spontaneously evaluative and comparative. In these ways, a notion of "intuitive district" di…

  • Travel Writing in Mongolia and Northern China, 1860-2020: 10. 5117/9789463726269

    Caroline Humphrey, Franck Billé et al.BOOKTravel Writing in Mongolia and…2023

  • Under the Shadow of the White Tara: The Buriat Buddhists in Imperial Russia, written by Nikolay Tsyrempilov

    Caroline HumphreyARTICLEInner Asia2023

  • Anthropological Fieldwork and 'Having an Ideology

    Open AccessCaroline HumphreyARTICLEEthnologia Polona2023References: 4

    In European anthropological circles there was a burst of interest in the topic of ideology in the 1970s in the wake of the riots of May 1968 in Paris and consequent intense interpretative conflict about theory among French intellectuals. The ideas then discussed in the wider context of the Cold War still have pertinence to the present day when ideology seems to clothe, if not inspire, armed confrontations and authoritarian forms of government. Th…

  • The Slippages of Exemplary Action: The Case of Ataman Semenov

    Open AccessCaroline HumphreyARTICLEComparative Studies in Society…2022Cited by: 1References: 8

    This article investigates exemplarity from the point of view of the subject, the person who leads an exemplary life. Asking how this differs from the case of someone who intends more simply to lead a morally good life, it argues that the former requires sharp prioritizing among the range of possible human virtues. While both kinds of actor should be understood in relational terms, namely relations to the self, direct interlocutors, and wider soci…

  • Subjectivities of Russian Traders at the Border with China

    Open AccessCaroline HumphreyARTICLEThe Copenhagen Journal of Asian…2021References: 11

    This paper draws attention to a relatively understudied aspect of cross-border trade: the relation between the subjectivities of traders and the geo-political situation they find themselves in. Among Russian traders at the border with China, discourses on comparative civilisation, memories of mid-twentieth century Soviet dominance and ambivalent appreciation of China’s present riches are integral to everyday practices. It is argued that a theoret…

  • Contested Landscapes in Inner Mongolia: Walls and Cairns

    Caroline HumphreyCHAPTERContested Landscapes2020

    This chapter provides a brief introduction to one region of Inner Mongolia settled by both Mongols and Chinese, each people seeing a very different landscape in the same territory. These landscapes arise within ways of life and memories; they are sedimented outcomes of many centuries of difference. The main line of the well-known ‘Great Wall’ was built to the south of the studied area between 1470 and 1480 during the Ming Dynasty. The literature …

  • Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism

    Ruth Mandel, Caroline HumphreyBOOKMarkets and Moralities2020

  • Introduction: Effective Slownesses

    G Delaplace, Caroline HumphreyARTICLEInner Asia2020

    International audience

  • Fast' and 'Slow: Abstract Thinking and 'Real Experience' in Two Mongolian Non-Pastoral Modes of Travel

    Open AccessCaroline HumphreyARTICLEInner Asia2020Cited by: 1References: 17

    This paper discusses two non-nomadic modes of transport in 1930s-60s Mongolia: the horse relay system and the goods caravan. It suggests that each of these should be seen as a 'mobility constellation' involving entanglements of mobility, narrative and practice, and implying different social relations and experience of the environment. It is argued that the relay system in particular involved abstract distance-speed calculation and that this enabl…

  • Real estate speculation: Volatile Social Forms at a Global Frontier of Capital

    Caroline HumphreyARTICLEEconomy and Society2020Cited by: 23References: 23

    This paper provides an anthropological perspective on speculation in housing by using the idea of 'social form' as the analytical lens. Instead of seeing speculation as a matter of individual orientation to risk/profit, or as a statistical tendency in a market, the advantage of 'social form' is that it introduces the dynamic complex of relations in which actors' decisions are made. The case examined here is the purchase of housing 'off plan' in c…

  • The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism

    Caroline HumphreyBOOKUnmaking of Soviet Life2019

    In order to understand today's Russia and former Soviet republics, it is vital to consider their socialist past. Caroline Humphrey, one of anthropology's most highly regarded thinkers on a number of topics including consumption, identity, and ritual, is the ideal guide to the intricacies of post-Soviet culture. The Unmaking of Soviet Life brings together ten of Humphrey's best essays, which cover, geographically, Central Russia, Siberia, and Mong…

  • A Nomadic Diagram

    Open AccessCaroline HumphreyARTICLESocial Analysis2019

    The idea of the diagram as a ‘working object’ is used to discuss the biologist C. H. Waddington’s epigenetic landscape (EL) diagrams. This article investigates the diagrams’ history and discusses their usages in relation to Stengers’s idea of the ‘nomadic concept’. What is it about these diagrams that have made them a tool for transdisciplinary research? The article argues that it is useful to distinguish between the diagram and the illustration,…

  • Afterword

    Open AccessLukas Engelmann, Caroline Humphrey et al.ARTICLESocial Analysis2019

    Philip Steadman’s epilogue suggests that the copying of drawings (and its study) by anthropologists, psychologists, architectural students, and Surrealists is revealing not only of processes of diagrammatization but also of the fact that there is something ‘diagrammatic’ about the way in which designs are represented mentally, which affects how they are seen and altered when they are reproduced. The work of diagrams, not only as visual objects bu…

  • Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands

    Caroline HumphreyPREPRINT2019References: 26

    In the proposed volume the authors aim to contribute to the anthropological understanding of trust in juxtaposition to the economy and the state. They focus on the specific economic exchanges and activities on the Sino-Russian border, agents of which might have - and do have - different reasons to mistrust each other. Activities at this location, we argue, destabilize the usual ideas of marginality and scale. This border could be considered geogr…

  • The fateful landing of the hoopoe: Omens from the world

    Open AccessCaroline HumphreyARTICLETerrain2019Cited by: 1References: 24

    This paper analyses the omen as a particular technique by which human subjects attempt to understand the uncertainties and misfortunes of their lives by way of receiving signs from the world. This method folds a singular event into a social form, a stabilized way of perceiving and responding to intimations of something about to change in the future. It is argued that perceiving omens is a practice of cosmological engagement and hence that its cha…

  • Deportees in Society: Ssyl’ka and Spetsposelenie in Soviet Buryatiya

    Caroline HumphreyARTICLEInner Asia2019Cited by: 1

    This paper discusses forced labour migrations in the Buryat-Mongolian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in the Stalin era. It attempts to set this regional case in the context of deportations and 'special settlements' in the USSR as a whole. It points out that forced labour migrants were not only sent to the Buryat Republic from western regions of the USSR; various categories of the 'repressed' were also deported from the Republic and displace…

  • Some Modes of Relating Hospitality, Mastery, and Mobility in Early xxth Century Mongolia

    Open AccessCaroline HumphreyARTICLEL Homme2019Cited by: 5References: 15

    This paper addresses the question of the relation between hospitality and mobility. Using materials from early xxth century nomadic pastoral Mongolia, it suggests that an overall field of interaction was produced by the notion of « the master » (ezen). This applied at all levels from the head of household to the emperor, but it also extended beyond the human realm to masterful deities and holy Buddhist figures. One of the chief qualities of the e…

  • Placing Self Amid Others: A Mongolian Technique of Comparison

    Caroline HumphreyCHAPTERRegimes of Comparatism2018

    This paper attempts to understand comparison as an intellectual endeavour in a non-European cultural milieu and then takes up the challenge of relating this case to the ways in which comparison is done in anthropology. These issues are discussed through analysis of one example, that of the conceptual apparatus of a Mongolian Buddhist lama and poet of the 18th century, Mergen Gegen. The paper argues that the Mongolian regime of comparison was done…

  • To Smile and Not to Smile

    Open AccessCaroline HumphreyARTICLESocial Analysis2018

    This article examines the role of smiling as a performative gesture at the northeast border between Russia and China. It argues that the border is a place where ‘myth’ in the sense proposed by Roland Barthes is manifest in the comportment of people when they see themselves as representing the civilization of one side or the other. In this situation, smiling and not smiling are elements of particular communicative registers that enact political my…