School of Social and Political Science

Dr Resto Cruz

Job Title

Lecturer in Social Anthropology

Photo
photo of Resto taken in Clubbidean reservoir

Room number

5.01

Building (Address)

Chrystal Macmillan Building

Street (Address)

15a George Square

City (Address)

Edinburgh

Country (Address)

UK

Post code (Address)

EH8 9LD

Research interests

Research interests

Kinship and relatedness, social mobility, life course research, Intergenerational relations, inheritance, personal lives, Archives, data, Philippines, Southeast Asia, Britain, Youth, ageing, Inequality, class

Supervision

I am keen on supervising students with projects related to any of my research interests, especially those working on Southeast Asia and the UK.

My current PhD students are:

If you are interested in working with me, please see the links below (open in new windows)for more information:

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

Works within

Staff Hours and Guidance

I am happy to meet students. You may book a slot using the following pages:

If the available slots don't suit your schedule, please send me an email.

 

Publications by user content

Publication Research Explorer link
Cruz R. Kinship and relatedness as vital lens. In McCallum C, Posocco S, Fotta M, editors, The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2023. p. 94-125. (Cambridge Handbooks in Anthropology). Epub 2023 Sept 29. doi: 10.1017/9781108647410.005
Tinkler P, Fenton L, Cruz R. Introducing ‘resonance’: Revisioning the relationship between youth and later life in women born 1939–52. The Sociological Review. 2022 Dec 22. Epub 2022 Dec 22. doi: 10.1177/00380261221140247
Cruz R, Tinkler P, Fenton L. The kinship of bioinformation: Relations in an evolving archive. In Gonzalez-Polledo EJ, Posocco S, editors, Bioinformation Worlds and Futures. Abingdon: Routledge. 2021. p. 54-74 Epub 2021 Nov 30. doi: 10.4324/9780367810030-4
Tinkler P, Cruz R, Fenton L. Recomposing persons: Scavenging and storytelling in a birth cohort archive. History of the Human Sciences. 2021 Jul 1;34(3-4):266-289. Epub 2021 Mar 8. doi: 10.1177/0952695121995398
Segal LB, Zabiliute E, Motta M, Cruz R, Jefferson AM, Das V. Book Forum. Conflict and Society. 2021 Jun 1;7(1):198-213. doi: 10.3167/arcs.2021.070114
Cruz R. Siblingship beyond siblings? Cousins and the shadows of social mobility in the central Philippines. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 2020 Jun 30;26(2):321-342. Epub 2020 Apr 7. doi: 10.1111/1467-9655.13250
Cruz R. An inheritance that cannot be stolen: Schooling, kinship, and personhood in post-1945 Central Philippines. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2019 Oct;61(4):894-924. Epub 2019 Oct 3. doi: 10.1017/S0010417519000240
Cruz R. When carabaos move to the city: Owners of the map: motorcycle taxi drivers, mobility, and politics in Bangkok By Claudio Sopranzetti. Anthropology Of This Century (AOTC). 2018 Oct 31;(23).
Cruz I R. Figures of migration: Gender, kinship, and the politics of representation. Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. 2012 Dec 31;60(4):513-554. doi: 10.1353/phs.2012.0039
Resto Cruz's Research Explorer profile