Dr Tiffany Cone
Dr Tiffany Cone is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, UAE. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Australian National University and a BA(Hons) in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. As an anthropologist and filmmaker,she has worked in the Pacific, East Asia, South Asia and the Middle East. From 2016 to 2021 she was an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh. During this time, she was also the Associate Dean of the Core Program.
Her research interest is in esoteric Islam. From 2011-2015 she conducted ethnographic research amongst a Chinese Sufi (Qadiriyya) order, focused on the cultivation of charismatic power. She continues to explore questions of subjectivity, identity and self within the broader field of psychological anthropology. She also integrates visual anthropological methods such as photography and filmmaking into her work. As a teacher, next to research into higher education and pedagogy, she focuses on “World Cinema” which explores representations of Islam in Bangladesh, Iran and Africa.
Selected Publications
2018 Cultivating Charismatic Power: Islamic Leadership Practice in China. New York: Palgrave MacMillan; https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319747620 .
2017 ‘Sounding the Soul: Mysticism and Music on Film’. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (TAPJA).
2017 ‘Islam: Saints and Sacred Geographies: China’. In: Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, Suad Joseph et al. (eds.). Leiden: Brill.
2017 ‘City of Saints: Linxia as the ‘centre’ of Qadiriyya Sufism in Northwest China’. In: Hsun Chang & Benjamin Penny (eds.), Religion in Taiwan and China : Locality and Transmission. Taipei: Academia Sinica, Institute of Ethnology.
2014 ‘Journeys of knowledge: the role of a Chinese Sufi gongbei in generating mobility between China and Iran’. In: Religion and Mobility in a Globalising Asia: New Ethnographic Explorations, Sinwen Lau and Nanlai Cao (eds.). Oxford, New York: Routledge.