Eleanor A. Power

e.a.power [at] lse.ac.uk

Research Interests

I am an anthropologist studying how religious belief, practice, and identity interact with and shape interpersonal relationships. I look at how people work to discern something of the character, moral being, and intentions of their peers through their actions – particularly their religious action. And, I look at how people strive to communicate something of themselves to others, both in dramatic and in subtle ways. I want to know how such actions and reactions form the basis not only of people’s perceptions of one another, but also form the substance of their relationships and the emergent structure of their social world. When such bonds are crucial to our ability to navigate and get by in the world, this ultimately is an investigation into how people’s religious lives shape their social and economic lives as well.

I do this with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, primary among which is social network analysis. My work is informed by signaling theory and the wider scholarship of human behavioral ecology. I am interested in the dynamics of social networks, especially relative to the factors that influence cooperation, competition, trust, and prestige. More generally, I am interested in investigating questions regarding: the role of religion in society, the interaction between costly signaling and cooperation, gender differences in prestige and social status, and the dynamics of punishment.

Publications

In Progress

In Press Eleanor A. Power and Elspeth Ready. Building Bigness: Reputation, Prominence, and Social Capital in Rural South India. American Anthropologist.

In Press Eleanor A. Power. Collective Ritual and Social Support Networks in Rural South India. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Published

2018 Elspeth Ready and Eleanor A. Power. Why Wage-Earners Hunt: Food Sharing, Social Structure, and Influence in an Arctic Mixed Economy. Current Anthropology. 59(1):74-97.

2018 Rebecca Bliege Bird, Elspeth Ready, and Eleanor A. Power. The Social Signifcance of Subtle Signals. Nature Human Behaviour 2(2):1-6.

2017 Eleanor A. Power. Praxis and Doxa: What a Focus on Ritual Can Offer Evolutionary Explanations of Religion. Religion, Brain, and Behavior.

2017 Caterina De Bacco, Eleanor A. Power, Daniel Larremore & Cristopher Moore. Community Detection, Link Prediction and Layer Interdependency in Multilayer Networks. Physical Review E. 95(4):042317.

2017 Eleanor A. Power. Social Support Networks and Religiosity in Rural South India. Nature Human Behaviour. 1:0057. PDF.

2017 Eleanor A. Power. Discerning Devotion: Testing the Signaling Theory of Religion. Evolution and Human Behavior. 38(1):82-91.

2017 Eleanor A. Power. The Roman-Byzantine Baths next to the Great Temple. Petra Great Temple Volume 3: Brown University Excavations 1993-2008, Architecture and Material Culture. Oxbow Press, Philadelphia, PA. 188-202.

2016 Eleanor A. Power. The Primacy of Social Support. Religion, Brain, and Behavior.

2015 Bird, Rebecca B. and Eleanor A. Power. Prosocial Signaling and Cooperation among Martu Hunters. Evolution and Human Behavior. 36(5):389-397.

2015 Eleanor A. Power. Building Bigness: Religious Practice and Social Support in Rural South India. Doctoral Dissertation. Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

2014 McCauley, Douglas J., Hillary S. Young, Roger Guevara, Gareth J. Williams, Eleanor A. Power, Robert B. Dunbar, Douglas W. Bird, William H. Durham, & Fiorenza Micheli. Positive and Negative Effects of a Threatened Parrotfish on Reef Ecosystems. Conservation Biology. 28(5):1312-1321.

2014 McCauley, Douglas J., Hillary S. Young, Eleanor A. Power, Douglas W. Bird, William H. Durham, Alex McInturff, Robert B. Dunbar, & Fiorenza Micheli. Pushing back against paper-park pushers – Reply to Craigie et al. Biological Conservation 172:223-224.

2013 McCauley, Douglas J., Eleanor A. Power, Douglas W. Bird, Alex McInturff, Robert B. Dunbar, William H. Durham, Fiorenza Micheli, & Hillary S. Young. Conservation at the Edges of the World. Biological Conservation 165 (September): 139–145.

2008 Eleanor A. Power. Costly Signalling in Religious Groups: The American Congregational Giving Study. M.Sc. in Human Evolution and Behaviour Dissertation, University College London.

2005 Robert J. Losey and Eleanor A. Power. Shellfish Remains from the Par-Tee Site (35-CLT-20), Seaside, Oregon: Making Sense of a Biased Sample. Journal of Northwest Anthropology 39(1):1-20.

Research Projects

Public Ritual in Tamil Nadu, India

Twenty months of fieldwork in two villages in Tamil Nadu, India, using social network analysis to test the signaling theory of religion. The data show that those who are involved, and involved in costlier ways, in the religious life of the village are not only seen as more devout, but also seen as having a wider suite of prosocial traits. Greater and costlier religious participation is also strongly positively correlated with a variety of centrality measures in the support network: those who are more religiously involved are better able to access the social support so necessary to one’s livelihood. Many of those support bonds are between religious co-participants: shared participation in ritual events increased the likelihood of a support tie between individuals, and, at the group structural level, helped to explain some of the clustering of the network.

Dissertation committee members: Rebecca Bird, Richard Sosis, Jamie Jones, Tanya Luhrmann, Sharika Thiranagama.

Fishing & Coral Reef Ecosystems, Kiribati

Interdisciplinary project on the human role in coral reef ecosystems. Conducted interviews and focal follows with fishers to look at the effects of fishing on coral reef ecosystems with an interdisciplinary team of ecologists, biogeochemists, and anthropologists on the island of Tabuaeran, Kiribati.

Collaborators: Doug McCauley, Fiorenza Micheli, Doug Bird, Rob Dunbar, William Durham.

American Congregational Giving Study, USA

Masters research using a survey of 625 US Christian congregations regarding religious giving and involvement to test predictions derived from the costly signaling theory of religion. Data accessible here.

Supervisor: Ruth Mace.

Vorotan Project, Armenia

Archaeological survey project in Armenia, undertaken to look at long-term shifts in the human landscape of the Vorotan River basin area.

Project directors: Susan Alcock & John Cherry.

Petra Great Temple Excavation, Jordan

Excavation of the Great Temple and the adjacent Roman and Byzantine bath complex in Petra, Jordan.

Project director: Martha Sharp Joukowsky.

Par-Tee Site, USA

Analysis of the shellfish remains from a prehistoric shell midden in Oregon (Par-Tee site, 35-CT-20), curated by the National Museum of Natural History.

Supervisor: Robert Losey.