Charles Stafford FBA (born 6 November 1956) is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics; he is also one of the co-founders of the LSE’s Programme in Culture & Cognition.
His research projects and scholarly publications have focused primarily on child development, learning, schooling, kinship, religion and the psychology of economic life.
[2] Stafford’s first major fieldwork project was conducted in the late 1980s in a Taiwanese fishing community where he examined, among other things, the sometimes tense relationship between nationalist schooling and local popular culture.
In the early 1990s he began conducting research in northeastern mainland China on issues surrounding kinship, selfhood and historical consciousness.
Much of his focus here was on the rituals and practices of “separation and reunion” which help structure the flow of social life in rural Chinese communities.