David Sneath is the Director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge University and a lecturer in Social Anthropology. He is a Fellow at Corpus Christi College where he is Deputy Tutor for Advanced Students and Director of Studies in Archaeology and Anthropology. David completed his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 1986.

His doctoral research was a study of social, economic and political change among Mongolian pastoralists in Inner Mongolia, China, where he did fieldwork in 1986 and 1987-88. His postdoctoral research concerned environment and society in Inner Asia, and he won a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. He regularly travels to Mongolia for research and carried out extended pieces of fieldwork with pastoralists in 1993 and 1996. In 1998 he took up a Lectureship in Anthropology and Development at Oxford University, and in January 2000 returned to Cambridge.

His research interests include the history of Inner Asian political forms, pastoralism, land-use and the environment, decollectivisation and post-socialist social transformations, political culture and economic institutions in Inner Asia, and the anthropology of development. He is the Co-editor of the journal Inner Asia, and the Chairman of the charity Cambridge Mongolia Disaster Appeal (CAMDA). He has authored over 20 books and papers on the region of Inner Asia. He has a wide range of non-research interests including creative writing, drama, travel and mountaineering.

List of publications