School of Social and Political Science

Background

I am a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. My work centres on how lives and relationships unfold over time, the traces that accumulate in their wake, and how they are shaped by, and generate, wider historical transformations. I have conducted ethnographic and archival research in the Philippines and the United Kingdom.

My current book project examines social and geographical mobility in post-1945 central Philippines: how parent-child ties and siblingship propelled the pursuit of upward mobility, but were also transformed by the shifts that they engendered. This project is based on ten years of ethnographic and archival research, and contributes to wider scholarship on the generative powers of kinship and personhood, as well as their complex and ambivalent character. This project builds on my doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh, supported by a Wadsworth International Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

From 2018-19, I was Research Associate at the University of Manchester, where he worked on the 'Transitions and Mobilities' project, an interdisciplinary study of postwar girlhood and youth transitions in Britain and their implications for later life (PI Professor Penny Tinkler). As part of this study, I was Visiting Researcher at the MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at the Institute of Cardiovacular Science, UCL. 

I originally trained in development studies and global politics at the Ateneo de Manila University (Philippines), where I was subsequently a sessional lecturer and researcher.

My publications are available on the University of Edinburgh's research portal and my personal Researchgate and Academia.edu profiles. 

Find me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/restocruz.bsky.social 

Teaching

I take pleasure on teaching on several undergraduate and postgraduate courses, including:

Generation and Inheritance: Anthropological Concepts (Honours and MSc)

Talk about 'generation' and 'inheritance' seem to be everywhere these days. In this course, we will examine anthropological work on these related concepts. We will reflect on how anthropologists have thought about and mobilised these concepts to understand pressing and enduring issues that cut across seemingly distinct areas of life, including kinship, politics, economics, health, and the environment. We will reflect, too, on the usefulness of 'generation' and 'inheritance' in understanding - and realising - social change.

Southeast Asia (Honours and MSc)

This course invites a close examination of a region that has often been characterised by anthropologists and historians as marked by great cultural diversity, but one that also appears to have an underlying cultural unity. The themes of diversity and unity can be discerned through the lens of some classic topics of anthropological analysis across the region - including ecology, religion, kinship, and politics. Through careful readings of classic and contemporary ethnographies of Southeast Asia together with films and fictional writing, this course will consider both locally salient social issues and the changing anthropological engagement with Southeast Asia over time.

Kinship: Structure and Process (Honours and MSc) (with Siobhan Magee)

This is a core course in social anthropology that investigates why relationships matter to people, and the difference that these make for who people are, their senses of self, and the kinds of lives that they live. It considers, too, how kinship is entangled with, and has consequences for, politics, economics, religion, and much else besides. This course involves reading recent and classic ethnographies, as well as films, poetry, and fiction.

Consumption, Exchange, and Technology (Honours and MSc) (with Richard Baxstrom and Tom Boylston)

This is core course on the anthropology of economic processes. My lectures in this course concern the significance of unequal class relations and how anthropologists have approached this topic through time; and how anthropologists have understood marketing as a set of practices that bring markets into being, and which implicate relations of various kinds, as well as economic actors' own bodies and subjectivities.

Undergraduate Dissertation (Supervision)

I have also contributed to teaching on the following courses in previous years:

• Ritual and Religion
• Social Anthropology 1A: The Life Course