Dr Angel Naydenov

PhD: The Intersubjective Foundations of Temporal Experience in China (Supervisor: Professor Uradyn Bulag)

Angel Nayden is a social anthropologist whose work focuses broadly on the entanglement of temporality and selfhood. More specifically, he reinterprets the anthropology of time from the perspective of value pursuits in which selves seek realisation and recognition. His doctoral thesis, Time, Self, and the Other in a Rural Chinese Township (2023, Cambridge), is based on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Sichuan Province, China and explores basic rhythmic structures of recognition like synchrony, dissonance, and continuity that symbolically extend the self in relation to others, thereby providing contrasting answers to basic questions of human existence related to work, play, death, ritual, care, and generation within the same rural community.