The Anthropology, Consciousness and Culture lecture series is a monthly event held in Blackwell's Bookshop, Park Street, Bristol. The aim of the lecture series is to promote social scientific discussions on issues of consciousness, culture and the ways in which they interact. Although taking a broadly anthropological approach, lectures will also be presented from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including archaeology, psychology, history and philosophy amongst others. Speakers include: Ronald Hutton, Fiona Bowie, Bruce Hood, David Luke, Bettina Schmidt, and Paul Devereux. Full programme

The Royal Anthropological Institute’s Sutasoma Award 2012 for outstanding research merit was awarded to ARC anthropologist Emily Pierini for her research The Journey of the Jaguares: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer. Her research, which is part of her PhD at the University of Bristol, looks at the experiences of spirit mediums in the Spiritualist Christian Order ‘Vale do Amanhecer’ (‘Valley of the Dawn’). Through intensive fieldwork in Brazil, she explored the process of mediumistic development and its therapeutic uses. The study also contributes methodological insights in relation to the reflexive use of somatic experience in gathering and interpreting data.

The ARC understands this recognition by a long-established anthropological institution as part of a ever-growing attention towards those aspects of human experience that we address in developing our ethnographic methodologies.