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Assistant Professor, Department of Methodology, London School of Economics & Political Science

I am an anthropologist studying how belief, practice, and identity interact with and shape interpersonal relationships. I look at how people work to discern something of the character, moral being, and intentions of their peers through their actions – particularly their religious action. And, I look at how people strive to communicate something of themselves to others, both in dramatic and in subtle ways. I want to know how such actions and reactions form the basis not only of people’s perceptions of one another, but also form the substance of their relationships and the emergent structure of their social world. When such bonds are crucial to our ability to navigate and get by in the world, this ultimately is an investigation into how people’s religious lives shape their social and economic lives as well.

I do this with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, primary among which is social network analysis. My work is informed by signaling theory and the wider scholarship of human behavioral ecology. I am interested in the dynamics of social networks, especially relative to the factors that influence cooperation, competition, trust, and prestige. More generally, I am interested in investigating questions regarding: the role of religion in society, the interaction between costly signaling and cooperation, gender differences in prestige and social status, and the dynamics of punishment.

Much of my work is based in two villages in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where I have been working since 2009. I am also the co-director of the ENDOW project, a collaborative network of social scientists undertaking cross-cultural comparative work. Right now, our main focus is a project investigating the dynamics of social networks and wealth inequality in small communities around the world.

I am currently an assistant professor in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics & Political Science. Prior to that, I was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. My PhD is from Stanford University, MSc from University College London, and BA from Brown University. See more at my departmental website.

Publications

vis.nodes <- read.csv("nodes.csv", header = TRUE)
vis.edges <- read.csv("edges.csv", header = TRUE)
vis.edges <- subset(vis.edges, vis.edges$from != "EleanorPower")
require(visNetwork)
visNetwork(vis.nodes, vis.edges)

Grants

Code & Data

Researchers interested in getting access to the data used in the papers listed below should email me!

Teaching

Details

Eleanor A. Power
Department of Methodology
Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE

e.a.power [at] lse.ac.uk

@eleanorapower

Google Scholar

ORCID

CV

My Erdős number is 3. (I co-authored with Cris Moore, who co-authored with Leonard Schulman, who co-authored with Erdős.)