Niepytalska, Marta, “Istvan Praet on Natural Catastrophes.” Carson Fellow Portraits. Directed by Alec Hahn. Filmed October 2011. MPEG video, 2:57. https://youtu.be/UXEWQnduCUo.
Istvan Praet is a lecturer in anthropology at Roehampton University in London. Originally from Belgium, Praet studied anthropology in Leuven. He then moved to the United Kingdom, where he obtained a doctorate in social anthropology from Oxford University. In previous years, he worked as a visiting fellow in the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale in Paris, as a research fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford, and as a Richard Carley Hunt Fellow at Cambridge. His principal areas of expertise are Latin America (Ecuador), Amerindian forms of animism, and anthropology’s relationship with the life sciences. He has conducted (and continues to conduct) ethnographic fieldwork among the Chachi, the Amerindian inhabitants of Esmeraldas, a lowland region on the Pacific coast. Key themes of his research are shamanism, ritual, the perception of catastrophes, and notions of metamorphosis. The comparison of indigenous and scientific notions of humanity and life is another central theme. As a Rachel Carson fellow in Munich, he worked on a project on the comparison of indigenous and scientific conceptions of disaster.
This Carson Fellow Portrait is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany License.
