Dr Thomas Strong
Biography
I received my BA in anthropology from Reed College in 1994. My BA thesis analysed the sociocultural significance of blood supplies, focusing especially on HIV risk and blood donor eligibility guidelines. As a staff research associate at the University of California in the 1990s, I conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork with gay youth on the streets of San Francisco, looking closely at social knowledge related to sex and HIV. An abiding interest in the sociocultural symbolism of blood and body drew me to the ethnography of Melanesia. Fieldwork in 2000-01 & 2003 in highland Papua New Guinea focused on changing forms of gender, personhood, and exchange in the context of modernity. Highlanders often interpret their experience of colonialism and Christian conversion through images bodily diminishment, decaying vitality, and the increased danger of witchcraft, changes summed up in a powerful contemporary cultural motif: the idea that men's bodies are shrinking. I completed a PhD in anthropology at Princeton University in 2004. After lecturing for two years at the University of Helsinki, I came to Maynooth in 2008. For three years I worked closely with the Combat Diseases of Poverty Consortium and with East African students and colleagues to build capacity for social research on health and illness in the developing world. I have since returned to a sustained focus on highland Papua New Guinea, conducting major fieldwork in 2013 and 2014 on contemporary witchcraft phenomena and how these express the disappointed promises of modernity.
Since 2009 I have been active in NGO and activist organisations in Dublin responding to the HIV crisis in Ireland.
Since 2009 I have been active in NGO and activist organisations in Dublin responding to the HIV crisis in Ireland.
Research Interests
Witchcraft, the body, HIV/AIDS, risk, misfortune, queer theory and LGBT studies; Papua New Guinea, the United States, East Africa
Former Project: "Culture and Sexual Risk: An Ethnographic Analysis of Gay Male Sexual Worlds in Ireland Today" Irish Research Council COALESCE Research Fund (2019/125), Sexual Health and Crisis Pregnancy Programme research strand.
Former Project, with LL Wynn (Macquarie) and Susana Trnka (Auckland): "Invisible Monsters?: The Pandemic Imaginary of Infectious Pathogens and Infectious Bodies" Social Science Research Council COVID-19 Rapid Response Grant.
Former Project: "Culture and Sexual Risk: An Ethnographic Analysis of Gay Male Sexual Worlds in Ireland Today" Irish Research Council COALESCE Research Fund (2019/125), Sexual Health and Crisis Pregnancy Programme research strand.
Former Project, with LL Wynn (Macquarie) and Susana Trnka (Auckland): "Invisible Monsters?: The Pandemic Imaginary of Infectious Pathogens and Infectious Bodies" Social Science Research Council COVID-19 Rapid Response Grant.
Peer Reviewed Journal
Year | Publication | |
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2021 | STRONG T.; TRNKA S.; WYNN L.L. (2021) '“L'ENFER, C'EST LES AUTRES”: Proximity as an Ethical Problem during COVID‐19'. Cultural Anthropology, 36 (3):341-349. [DOI] [Full-Text] | |
2021 | Strong, T (2021) 'THE END OF INTIMACY'. Cultural Anthropology, 36 :381-390. [DOI] [Full-Text] | |
2020 | Drazkiewicz, E;Strong, T;Scheper-Hughes, N;Turpin, H;Murphy, F;Saris, AJ;Garvey, P;Mishtal, J;Wulff, H;French, B;Miller, D;Maguire, L;Mhordha, MN (2020) 'Repealing Ireland's Eighth Amendment: abortion rights and democracy today'. Social Anthropology, . [DOI] [Full-Text] | |
2009 | Strong, T (2009) 'Vital Publics of Pure Blood'. Body and Society, 15 :169-191. [DOI] | |
2007 | S.L. Eyre, E. Arnold, E. Peterson and T. Strong (2007) 'Romantic relationships and their social context among gay/bisexual male youth in the Castro District of San Francisco'. Journal of Homosexuality, 53 :1-29. [DOI] [Full-Text] | |
2006 | Strong, Thomas (2006) 'Land and Life: Some Terrains of Sovereignty in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea'. SUOMEN ANTROPOLOGINEN SEURA, 31 :37-52. [Full-Text] | |
2002 | Strong, Thomas (2002) 'Kinship Between Judith Butler and Anthropology?'. Ethnos, 67 :401-418. [DOI] [Full-Text] | |
1997 | Strong, Thomas (1997) 'Blood/Money'. CRITICAL MATRIX, 6 :20-37. [Full-Text] | |
1996 | Strong, Thomas (1996) 'Plastic Heart, Black Box, Iron Cage: Instrumental Reason and the Artificial Heart Experiment'. DISCLOSURE, 5 :25-53. [Full-Text] |
Book Chapter
Year | Publication | |
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2018 | Strong, Thomas (2018) 'Mary Douglas' In: International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Hoboken : John Wiley & Sons. [Link] | |
2017 | Strong, Thomas (2017) 'Becoming Witches: Sight, Sin, and Social Change in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea' In: Pentecostalism and Witchcraft in Melanesia and Africa. Basingstoke, United Kingdom : Palgrave. [Link] [Full-Text] | |
2013 | Strong, Thomas (2013) 'Judith Butler' In: R. Jon McGee, Richard Warms(Eds.). Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology. Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications. | |
2008 | Strong, Thomas (2008) 'Kinship between Judith Butler and Anthropology' In: Delamont, Sara & Paul Atkinson(Eds.). Gender and Research. Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications. | |
2006 | Strong, Thomas (2006) '’Dying Culture’ and Decaying Bodies' In: Sandra Bamford(Eds.). Embodying Modernity and Postmodernity: Ritual, Praxis, and Social Change in the South Pacific. Durham, NC : Carolina Academic Press. |
Other Journal
Year | Publication | |
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2013 | Gray, Patty and Thomas Strong (2013) 'Ethical Currents: The Place of Ethics in Ireland and Elsewhere'' Anthropology News, 52 . [Full-Text] | |
2002 | Strong, Thomas (2002) 'Deceptive Faces' Letter to The New Yorker, 2002 . |
Blog
Year | Publication | |
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2018 | Strong, Thomas (2018) Dispossession as historical allegory: Observing Dublin’s housing crisis. New York: BLOG [Link] |
Conference Contribution
Book Review
Certain data included herein are derived from the © Web of Science (2023) of Clarivate. All rights reserved.
Teaching Interests
I have been blessed with opportunities to conduct substantial fieldwork and research in very different places. Between 1998 and 2015 I made several field trips to highland Papua New Guinea, initially focusing on ways in which the body mediates sociality and symbolism, and therefore also history and transformation, for the Dano-speakers of the upper Asaro valley. In the course of fieldwork, I unexpectedly learned that the upper Asaro is an epicentre in a wave of witchcraft violence that has overtaken the country in the last many years. As a result, I am one of a handful of anthropologists to have witnessed a witch hunt in real time: a fascinating and terrible thing to experience. Analysis of the social dynamics of such outbursts of violence informs my teaching in classes such as Magic and Witchcraft, Medical Anthropology, Misfortune and Meaning, and Troubling Identities.
In a very different mode, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork on gay male sexual culture since 1996, first as a young graduate student ethnographer working with young gay men on the streets of San Francisco as a research associate with the University of California, and most recently as a middle-aged American puzzling his way through the often furtive social worlds of gay male sexuality in contemporary Ireland. Though the watershed in conceptions of sexual morality (as well as reproductive freedom, gender equality, transgender rights, and more) Ireland has witnessed makes this an especially fascinating time to do research here, it has also afforded insight into how sentiments we thought might have been superseded continue to structure the experience of sexuality for gay men (and everyone): above all, sex is always shadowed by shame, much as the past is ever-present. My research on gay men, sexuality, HIV, and more informs modules I offer on topic such as: Ireland in the World, Medical Anthropology, Troubling Identities, and (in the postgraduate programme) Privates and Counterprivates.
The Ethnographer's Magic
With a bit of cheek, I teach anthropology as a kind of wizardry, or sorcery: Anthropology puts a spell on you. Once the spell takes hold, the student of anthropology can't fail to feel its effect: it elicits (or imposes) the capacity to 'think otherwise.' The basic principle of this form of magic is deceptively simple — it is to approach one’s own way of life as strange by becoming familiar with the ways of life of others. Familiarity, however, should not be confused with comfort or indifference; in learning about the lives of others, anthropologists wish to recognise difference, to value Otherness, without making it disappear. Making difference vanish is the trickery (the illusionism) of other disciplines built on universalist theories of the nature of human beings (as rational economic actors, or as fragile subjects fated to this or that psychodynamic anxiety). To appreciate Otherness without making it vanish, anthropology counsels an elementary equation: we too are an Other. The principle adheres to a law of magic on the order of those adumbrated by Frazer in The Golden Bough. It is the Law of the Familiarstrange. Anthropology shows the wonders to be created when we are able to yoke the power of the familiarstrange in order to think otherwise.
In a very different mode, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork on gay male sexual culture since 1996, first as a young graduate student ethnographer working with young gay men on the streets of San Francisco as a research associate with the University of California, and most recently as a middle-aged American puzzling his way through the often furtive social worlds of gay male sexuality in contemporary Ireland. Though the watershed in conceptions of sexual morality (as well as reproductive freedom, gender equality, transgender rights, and more) Ireland has witnessed makes this an especially fascinating time to do research here, it has also afforded insight into how sentiments we thought might have been superseded continue to structure the experience of sexuality for gay men (and everyone): above all, sex is always shadowed by shame, much as the past is ever-present. My research on gay men, sexuality, HIV, and more informs modules I offer on topic such as: Ireland in the World, Medical Anthropology, Troubling Identities, and (in the postgraduate programme) Privates and Counterprivates.
The Ethnographer's Magic
With a bit of cheek, I teach anthropology as a kind of wizardry, or sorcery: Anthropology puts a spell on you. Once the spell takes hold, the student of anthropology can't fail to feel its effect: it elicits (or imposes) the capacity to 'think otherwise.' The basic principle of this form of magic is deceptively simple — it is to approach one’s own way of life as strange by becoming familiar with the ways of life of others. Familiarity, however, should not be confused with comfort or indifference; in learning about the lives of others, anthropologists wish to recognise difference, to value Otherness, without making it disappear. Making difference vanish is the trickery (the illusionism) of other disciplines built on universalist theories of the nature of human beings (as rational economic actors, or as fragile subjects fated to this or that psychodynamic anxiety). To appreciate Otherness without making it vanish, anthropology counsels an elementary equation: we too are an Other. The principle adheres to a law of magic on the order of those adumbrated by Frazer in The Golden Bough. It is the Law of the Familiarstrange. Anthropology shows the wonders to be created when we are able to yoke the power of the familiarstrange in order to think otherwise.