Annemarie Samuels is Associate Professor at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology. She has extensive research experience in Indonesia on the topics of narratives, morality, care, HIV/AIDS and disaster and a broad interest in psychological anthropology, narrative studies, phenomenology, and medical anthropology. Annemarie is Principal Investigator of the ERC project “Globalizing Palliative Care? A Multi-sited Ethnographic Study of Practices, Policies and Discourses of Care at the End of Life. 

More information about Annemarie Samuels

Annemarie Samuels is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. She is Principal Investigator of the ERC project Globalizing Palliative Care? A Multi-sited Ethnographic Study of Practices, Policies and Discourses of Care at the End of Life. 

From January 2017 to December 2018 Annemarie was a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Global Fellow at Harvard University (2017) and Leiden University (2018) with the project The Power of Silence: A Medical Anthropological Approach to AIDS Care Narratives. Annemarie is Director of Research of the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology’ and co-convenor of the Leiden University Medical Anthropology Network and the Unfolding Finitudes webinar series. She is editorial committee member of the Annual Review of Anthropology and of the BKI: Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia.

After the Tsunami

In 2019 her monograph After the Tsunami: Disaster Narratives and the Remaking of Everyday Life in Aceh was published by the University of Hawai’i press. She also is co-editor of Islam and the Limits of the State: Reconfigurations of Practice, Community, and Authority in Contemporary Aceh (Brill, 2015). 

Recent Publications

Her recent publications include Strategies of silence in an age of transparency: Navigating HIV and visibility in Aceh, Indonesia (History and Anthropology) which was awarded honorable mention for the 2021 Stirling Prize for best article in psychological anthropology.

Other publications include ‘Revisioning and Revisiting Silence and Narrative in Psychological Anthropology’ with Merav Shohet, ‘Palliative Care Practices and Policies in Diverse Socio-Cultural Contexts: Aims and Framework of the ERC Globalizing Palliative Care Comparative Ethnographic Study’ with Natashe Lemos Dekker, ‘Silence at the End of Life: Multivocality at the Edges of Narrative Possibility’,  Narrative Navigation: HIV and (Good) Care in Aceh, Indonesia (Springer), This Path is Full of Thorns: Narrative, Subjunctivity, and HIV in Indonesia (Ethos), Embodied Narratives of Disaster: The Expression of Bodily Experience in Aceh (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute), Seeing AIDS in Aceh: Sexual Moralities and the Politics of Invisibility in Post-Reconstruction Times (Indonesia), and Narratives of Uncertainty: The Affective Force of Child-Trafficking Rumors in Postdisaster Aceh, Indonesia (American Anthropologist).

Together with Ana Dragojlovic, she edited the special collection Silent Reverberations: Potentialities of Attuned Listening in American Anthropologist  and a special issue on silences in the journal History and Anthropology, and co-authored the preface Tracing silences: towards an anthropology of the unspoken and unspeakable. Together with Sarah Giest she published ‘For good measure’: data gaps in a big data world (Policy Sciences)' and 'Administrative burden in digital public service delivery: The social infrastructure of library programs for e-inclusion'. 

CV A. Samuels (2024)

First-person perspective of remaking lifeworlds

In her earlier research projects on post-disaster reconstruction and experiences of living with HIV/AIDS, Annemarie focused on a first-person perspective of remaking lifeworlds in the face of extreme hardship. Her work explores how people make and remake relations with the world and others through narratives and silences and how they navigate ethical demands in such difficult circumstances. Thereby, it illuminates the ways in which people subjectively engage with the social and political forces that shape their lives in times of crisis. 

In her current research project, she studies the globalization and cultural mediation of palliative care practices, policies and discourses.