Alex Edmonds

 

Background

Alexander (Alex) Edmonds received a PhD in anthropology from Princeton University in 2003, after studying philosophy at Stanford University and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.  He is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam.  Prior to that, he held a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Modern Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, and a lectureship in anthropology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.  He is director of the Masters in Medical Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam.

 

Research interests

His research has examined beauty and health in relation to the socioeconomic and psychological transformations of modernity.  Drawing on long term ethnographic research among Brazilian elites and the urban poor, he has developed a theoretical framework for understanding beauty as a distinct domain of social experience not reducible to other hierarchies.  This work also explores the ethics and social uses of medical enhancement technologies such as plastic surgery in the developing world, and the emergence of a "biologized self" in sexual and medical cultures. 

His interests in medical anthropology include critical studies of international development and the use of ethnographic methods to understand health problems.  He is working with partner institutions to design a community-based health intervention that is responsive to the sexual and reproductive health needs of adolescents in Latin America.  This research is funded by an FP7 grant from the EU. 

Alex is also a visual and media anthropologist, who works with documentary video and photography.  He has done ethnographic fieldwork at TV studios and advertising agencies in Brazil, analyzing the emergence of new black identifications during a time when citizenship is being defined within the domain of consumer culture.  He is interested in the craft of ethnographic writing, exploring its affinities with other genres such as creative non-fiction, documentary, and the essay. 

 

Publications

His book on beauty and plastic surgery is forthcoming with Duke University Press.  Other representative publications are:

2007. “’The Poor Have the Right to be Beautiful’: Cosmetic Surgery in Neoliberal Brazil,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13: 363-381.

2008.  "Beauty and Health: Anthropological Perspectives."  Medische Antropologie 20(1).

2008.  Em Nome da Mãe (In the Name of the Mother). 30 minute documentary video.  Co-directed with Simone Lima and shot in collaboration with residents of a favela in Fortaleza, Brazil.

2009. “’Engineering the Erotic’: Aesthetic Medicine and Modernization in Brazil,” in Cressida J. Heyes and Meredith Jones (eds.) Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer, p. 153-169.  Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

 

Teaching

Alex has taught courses on anthropological theory, mental health and emotion, visual anthropology and video production, cultural globalization, reading ethnography, and Brazilian society and culture.

Click here to visit his UvA website