Institution Affiliation
University of Wyoming
Department of Anthropology
Education
Ph.D., University of Cambridge, England
Research Interests
The particular entanglements of politics, economics, and culture on the Asia Pacific rim; political lives of dead bodies, particularly the circulation of religious relics, bodies, and body parts
Regional and Thematic Interests
East Asia; Southeast Asia
Religion
Profile
Ruth Toulson joined the faculty of the University of Wyoming in 2011. She is a Cambridge trained socio-cultural anthropologist whose ethnographic research shifts between sites in Southeast Asia and Mainland China. Her research engages with the particular entanglements of politics, economics, and culture on the Asia Pacific rim.
Her recent work, with ethnic-Chinese in Singapore, considers the personal perils of capitalist modernity, interrogated through the lens of popular imaginings of the dissatisfied dead. While Singapore is often imagined as disenchanted and sterile, Dr. Toulson reveals that in fact its citizens live an extraordinarily rich and hitherto largely undocumented life of interaction with malevolent ghosts, capricious ancestors, and the undead whom they speak of as pervading their homes and public spaces. At present she is working on a book that presents accounts from coffin carriers, gravediggers, and personal shoppers for the dead, who describe their efforts to satisfy both the desires of the dead and the demands of the state. She focuses particularly on the women who tend to the dead and are caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the patriarchal family, and a moralistic developmental state.
More broadly, Dr. Toulson is interested in the political lives of dead bodies, particularly the circulation of religious relics, bodies, and body parts.
Selected Publications
2013 "The Meanings of Red Envelopes: Promises and Lies at a Singaporean Chinese Funerals." Journal of Material Culture 18, no. 2: 155- 169.
2012 "Necessary Mistakes: Reconciling the Unsettled Dead and the Imagined State in Singapore." In Power: Southeast Asia Perspectives, edited by Liana Chua, Joanna Cook, Nick Long, and Lee Wilson. London: Routledge.