Dr. Floramante SJ Ponce merges various theories and methods of social anthropology and sociology in understanding the economic, political, and sociocultural dynamics of Southeast Asia, particularly Laos and the Philippines. Dr. Ponce holds an MA in Sociology (Ateneo de Manila University, the Philippines), an MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology (Central European University, Hungary), and a PhD in Social Anthropology (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany). Most of his peer-reviewed papers scrutinize how a Chinese hydropower, which is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, facilitates electric-induced modernity, market (dis)integration, as well as geographical, socioeconomic, and metaphorical (im)mobilities among affected communities in northern Laos. When Dr. Ponce becomes a postdoctoral fellow of LAMC, he shifts his interests from electrical power to cosmological and spiritual forms of power. He specifically investigates how the external power that Lao amulets can muster helps fix Lao people’s broken interiorities, which are caused by post-pandemic economic shocks, rapid societal and digital transitions, and ecological disruptions.

Contacter Floramante SJ