Author: Eona Bell

Eona Bell has a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics (2012) and was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the SOAS China Institute. Her research interests include the anthropology of childhood; gender, care and intimacy; kinship and cultural transmission in overseas Chinese communities; cognitive anthropology; and religion. She is currently an Affiliated Lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology in Cambridge, and is conducting research on historic photographs of Singapore at MAA. She is also the co-editor (with Charles Stafford and Ellen R. Judd) of 'Cooperation in Chinese communities: morality and practice' (Bloomsbury 2018).

Classifying Combs – And the People Who Wore Them

Museums have always described and categorised objects and people in problematic ways. But can this be done more humanely? Eona Bell shows with the example of some combs from Malaysia.

Eona Bell

17 October 2023

Model of a tent made of sticks inserted into board. The tent has a high peak with cloth rolled up to form an entrance, is carpeted with lace-trimmed red cloth. The tent also has three pillows and four rectangles of cloth, one of which has a floral pattern and purple edging.

The Story of a Tent and its Gypsy Maker

Cambridge anthropologist Ivor Evans' interest in the heritage of British Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller communities led to the preservation of objects familiar to rural Britain in the 1930s.

Eona Bell

26 September 2023

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