Topic description and stories

A feather in your cap: inside the symbolic universe of Renaissance Europe

02 Nov 2017

Today, feathers are an extravagant accessory in fashion; 500 years ago, however, they were used to constitute culture, artistry, good health and even...

Read more
Flamenco by Veyis Polat (cropped)

Flamenco: what happens when a grassroots musical genre becomes a marker of culture

18 Aug 2016

What happens when a musical genre becomes an identifier for a region? In his book Flamenco, Regionalism and Musical Heritage in Southern Spain ...

Read more
Angels have the phone box

Why be human when you can be otherkin?

16 Jul 2016

As social beings, a sense of identity plays an important role in our relations – and in our own happiness. But identity doesn’t have to be narrowly...

Read more
Traffic in Ulaanbaator

Mongolia: unravelling the troubled narratives of a nation

27 Feb 2015

In two separate books, anthropologists Dr Franck Billé and Dr Christopher Kaplonski look at the identity of Mongolia, a country that stands at a...

Read more
Dancing at the opening of a stupa in Shatta village

Creating a shared resource for the endangered culture of the Kalmyks

21 Sep 2014

Almost four centuries ago, ancestors of the Kalmyk people trekked across central Asia to form a Buddhist nation on the edge of Europe. Today Kalmyk...

Read more

I’ve been working like a dog: revisiting a 1960s study of the working class

10 Jul 2014

The Beatles' song A Hard Day’s Night was released 50 years ago today. Its runaway success in the charts overlapped with a major sociological study of...

Read more
Case de Juntas, Gernika

Cultural heritage after conflict

01 May 2010

A collaborative study led by Cambridge is examining the impact on society of the destruction and reconstruction of cultural heritage.

Read more
Subscribe to identity Subscribe to news and stories from Cambridge on identity