How we become who we are: interview with Christina Toren

Abstract

Professor Emeritus of the Department of Social Anthropology at University of St. Andrews and founding director of the Center for Pacific Studies, Christina Toren has been instrumental in charting the new directions of contemporary anthropology. Her contributions to the study of Fiji and the Pacific, sociality, kinship and ideas of the person, ontogeny as historical process, and epistemology, are remarkable, and have guided profound theoretical reformulations worldwide. We met for this interview at her home in Dundee, Scotland, during the period she supervised a research study that we developed at the University of St. Andrews.