Dr Angelo Marcelo Vasco

Postdoctoral Affiliate

Bio

Angelo Vasco is an anthropologist whose research focuses on religion, social change, material culture, and heritage in West Africa, particularly Guinea-Bissau. He completed his DPhil in Anthropology at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, with a thesis examining Evangelical Christianity and Brazilian missionary activity in Guinea-Bissau. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research in Portugal, Brazil, and Guinea-Bissau, his work explores conversion as a process of social navigation, asking how religious change is shaped by mobility, kinship, ethnicity, and longstanding forms of religious coexistence. More broadly, his research engages with the anthropology of Christianity and the study of religious pluralism, with particular attention to the ways Christian practices interact with local ritual life, sociality, and understandings of personhood.

Alongside his work on Christianity and conversion, Angelo’s research explores material culture, cultural loss, and processes of heritage-making. He has co-directed a project funded by the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP) focused on ceramic traditions among Diola-Baiote communities in northern Guinea-Bissau. Combining ethnographic and visual methods, the project recorded the chaîne opératoire of ceramic production and explored the place of pottery within domestic and ritual life, producing a digital archive of photographs, films, maps, and other materials aimed at documenting and safeguarding knowledge of Diola-Baiote ceramic traditions.

His current research brings these interests together by examining how religious transformation, material culture, and changing understandings of tradition intersect in contemporary Guinea-Bissau. Angelo is particularly interested in the historical transformations of traditional religious practices and cosmologies through their long-term engagements with Christianity and Islam. His research also examines how objects and practices move between different regimes of value—as elements of everyday and ritual life that may be rejected or transformed through religious conversion, and as forms of cultural heritage to be documented, preserved, or displayed.

Research interests

Anthropology of Christianity; Conversion and Religious Change; West African Anthropology; Religious Pluralism; Missionary Encounters; Ritual and Personhood; Material Culture and Material Religion; Heritage and Cultural Loss; Endangered Knowledge Systems; Visual Anthropology.

Academia link
Email: angelo.vasco@anthro.ox.ac.uk