Dr Tom Boylston
Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
Contact details
- Email: tom.boylston@ed.ac.uk
Background
I am a social anthropologist specializing in play, worldmaking, and improvisation. I am interested in the creative/destructive powers of play; connections between playfulness and health; and in traditions of improvisation and the tools they offer us for responding to the unexpected.
My first research was an ethnographic study of Orthodox Christianity in an Ethiopian Village. My work showed how life, sickness, and death are mediated by embodied practices of fasting, feasting, and ritual creativity.
I was drawn to the study of religion by the same questions that animate my current study of play: how do we make worlds? Everything I have worked on seems to revolve around how creativity and imagination related to embodied, material practices. My current focus, drawing on ideas from my early work, is how playfulness and improvisation enable us to deal with the reality of illness and death. I draw on strands from psychotherapy, anthropology, and game studies, and have been lucky to begin working with some very brilliant improvisers.