Understanding the drivers and dynamics of social and economic inequality is of core interest to social scientists, policy makers, and the public. I will introduce two projects that are part of an effort to bring new empirical data to facilitate that understanding. The ENDOW project (for Economic Networks and the Dynamics of Wealth inequality) focuses on the role that social networks play in exacerbating or mitigating inequality. It brings together a large team of anthropologists, working in over 30 countries around the world, to gather extensive demographic, economic, and social network data, across two points of time. The Rep2SI project (for Reputation and the Reproduction of Social Inequality) draws on data gathered as part of ENDOW to facilitate the running of experimental games that vary the reputational stake of people’s decisions, to see how that social exposure shapes people’s actions.

About the Speaker

Eleanor Power’s research is based around her ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where she has been working for over a decade, and increasingly entails collaborative cross-cultural comparative work. Prior to joining LSE, she was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, where she is now a member of the external faculty. 

Zoom details: 
https://anu.zoom.us/meeting/register/AZA2qinMT-q6jvo6vdFvSg

Presented as part of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology's 2025 Biological Anthropology Research (BAR) Seminar series