Dr Anthony Pickles

• BSc in Anthropology (University College London)
• MRes in Social Anthropology (University College London)
• PhD in Social Anthropology (St Andrews, funded by ESRC)
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

I am a political and economic anthropologist working on capitalism, economic innovation, risk, colonisation, development and globalisation through its local collisions. I focus on economic life as experienced by people on the ground, most notably on gambling activity as a crucible for examining wider experiences of socio-economic and political rupture.

I am currently conducting research into political gambling and prediction markets, as a global phenomena at the cutting edge of shaping contemporary political understanding.

My ethnographic fieldwork in urban and rural Papua New Guinea began in 2009 during my PhD (University of St Andrews, 2013). I joined the University of Birmingham as Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology in 2023. In the interim I held research fellowships, one from Trinity College, Cambridge and then one from The British Academy (held in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge). Then I taught social anthropology and international development at the University of East Anglia, 

• Social Life of the Economy (optional module for second- and third-year undergraduates and masters)
• Research in Practice (core module for second-year undergraduates)
• Undergraduate dissertation supervision

Economic anthropology, Oceania, gambling, political anthropology, anthropology of the future, anthropology of finance, anthropology of elites

Find out more - our PhD African Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Locations: Oceania (the Western Pacific), Papua New Guinea, the UK, online ethnography.

Topics: cash/money, cash transfers, corruption, socio-cultural escalations, ethnomathematics, experimental ethnographic methods, gambling, gifts, history of anthropology, informal economy, intra- and extra- family transfers, markets, pocket-use, sports, social change, technological adoption, the theory of economic transfers, new technologies, forecasting, prediction.