Dr Carla Stang

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Carla D. Stang received an honours degree in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, completed her doctorate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2005, and before returning to the University of Sydney, she held the position of Associate Researcher in Anthropology at Columbia University. For the most part she carries out her ethnographic fieldwork with the Mehinaku people of the Upper Xingu area in the Brazilian Amazon but has an abiding interest in comparative field research.

Her work is generally concerned with people’s actual experience of their lives, as Malinowski, a founder of anthropology describes it: “the outlook on life… the breath of life and reality” of the people concerned. She has focussed on developing an anthropology of the experience of ‘ordinary reality’, people’s sense of moment-to-moment existence, those parts of life that happen between activities and other discrete events. Overall this research has been done in the context of pragmatism and existential and phenomenological anthropology. Dr Stang is interested in the intricacies involved in writing anthropology, particularly in the creation of methodologies for writing about events of consciousness such as those of ordinary reality, and also of other events that are of utmost interest to her, such as those of mystical experience, the effectiveness of ritual and the experience of landscape. She is also concerned with the field of comparative environmental ethics. This year she launched her first book, A Walk to the River in Amazonia: Ordinary Reality for the Mehinaku Indians, published by Berghahn Press.