"Through life changes and career moves, we developed an agent-based model and found some credence to my hunch [about different reputational benefits connected to religious action], and other new insights, too. For me, this was a great collaboration: true interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation, and a chance to work with friends."
- Dr Eleanor Power discusses an area of her research that makes her proud as part of our 30th Anniversary celebrations. Read the full close-up with Methodology faculty.
Eleanor Power is an Associate Professor in the Department of Methodology. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University in 2015. Prior to joining ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ in 2017, she was an Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.
Research interests
Eleanor is an anthropologist interested in how belief, practice, and identity interact with and shape interpersonal relationships. She looks at how people work to discern something of the character, moral being, and intentions of their peers through their actions, and equally how people strive to communicate something of themselves to others, both in dramatic and in subtle ways. She studies 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.
She studies these dynamics through fieldwork conducted in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu and through collaborative cross-cultural comparative work. She combines qualitative ethnographic work with more structured forms of data collection and analysis, primary among which is social network analysis. Her current research is focused on understanding social and economic inequality in cross-cultural perspective (as the co-director of the ENDOW project), and the micro-dynamics of social inequality and the “reputational poverty trap” (as the PI of the Rep2SI project).