Dr. Rita Astuti

Biography

Rita Astuti is a renowned expert in social anthropology with a particular focus on Madagascar. She has conducted extensive fieldwork since the late 1980s, exploring key themes such as kinship, personhood, gender, group identity, and belief systems. Her approach integrates traditional ethnographic methodologies with experimental methods, drawing from her collaborations with cognitive developmental psychologists at prestigious institutions like NYU and Harvard. This innovative fusion of techniques has transformed her analysis of ethnographic material and led to a challenge of established anthropological perspectives regarding kinship, ultimately generating fresh insights into cultural learning processes. In her recent work, she has investigated the implications of fish stock depletion in local waters, specifically within the context of seasonal migration along the northern coast of Madagascar. Rita is also the author of the significant work 'People of the Sea: Identity and Descent among the Vezo of Madagascar' published by Cambridge University Press in 1995, and has contributed to the developmental psychologists' publication, 'Constraints on Conceptual Development' (2004). She has shared her extensive research experiences in Madagascar in various formats, including her participation in the Know Show Podcast recorded during the COVID lockdown in 2020.

Research Interests