Grant Evans

Grant Evans taught anthropology at the University of Hong Kong for 20 years and has published widely on Asia, and Laos in particular. His books have been translated into Vietnamese, Chinese, Lao and Thai. His Asia's Cultural Mosaic: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Asia is well known, and he has edited a book with Maria Tam, Hong Kong: The Anthropology of a Chinese Metropolis. His most recent books on Laos are A Short History of Laos: The Land Inbetween, and The Last Century of Lao Royalty. Since 2005 he has mostly lived and worked in Vientiane Laos, where he is an adviser to the Academy of Social Sciences.

Grant Evans reviews 'The Reading Group' by Amanda Lohrey

June 1988, no. 101 • 01 June 1988

Do people still have reading groups? I suppose they do. I wonder what people in them read these days. Foucault? No, that’s surely passe. Do they have reading groups about novels which read novels about reading groups which don’t read novels? Perhaps. And would that qualify as meta-literature about meta-theory? Probably yes, especially if you were in a post-Foucault reading group about novels. ... (read more)

Grant Evans reviews 'Claude Lévi-Strauss: The poet in the laboratory' by Patrick Wilcken

March 2011, no. 329 • 01 March 2011

In retrospect, it seems hard to explain the widespread influence of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. When he died at the age of one hundred in 2009, the New York Times said in its obituary that he was ‘the French anthropologist whose revolutionary studies of what was once called “primitive man” transformed Western understanding of the nature of culture, custom and civilization’. It ... (read more)