Pierre Petit
ACA
Pierre Petit is Senior Research Associate at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) and professor of anthropology at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB, LAMC). After his PhD on the rituals of the Luba of Katanga, he investigated material culture, ethnicity, urban anthropology, and research methodology in Congo. Since 2003, he works in Laos and more especially on the mobilities of highlanders involved in rural exodus, investigating by the same token the relations between the state and the ethnic minorities. His interest in historical anthropology appears in a monograph, History, Memory, and Territorial Cults in the Highlands of Laos: The Past Inside the Present (Routledge 2020), and in a recent volume coedited with Jean Michaud, Chasing Traces. History and Ethnography in the Uplands of Socialist Asia (University of Hawaii Press 2024). He is the editor of Civilisations, the main journal of anthropology based in Belgium.
As an art historian and numismatist – he is the president of the Belgian Royal Numismatic Society –, he conducts research on medals and talismanic culture in Laos, as well as on the globalisation of Catholic iconographies, with a special interest in devotional medals related to China and Congo.
