Despite unprecedented access to information, our understanding of social worlds beyond our own is often thin, distorted, or flattened into binary stereotypes. As political polarisation increases across the globe, the capacity to grasp how others live and make sense of the world has never mattered more. Yet we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Public debate increasingly trades in overly simplified narratives that fuel prejudice and disconnection, narrowing how people imagine and respond to different ways of life. Even within anthropology, changing institutional and funding environments make it harder to sustain the specialist knowledge, language skills, and long-term fieldwork on which serious inquiry depends.

Through sustained, fine-grained empirical research and theoretical innovation, we produce nuanced accounts of social life across Asia. This work contributes to more informed public and scholarly conversations about social and cultural difference, reducing reliance on simplistic and polarised framings. In doing so, we challenge received assumptions and stereotypes and foster a more grounded understanding of how people in different parts of the world live – their religious practices, social, political and economic realities, relationships with the environment, and forms of cultural and artistic expression.
Asia’s global influence is undeniable. Yet its sociocultural diversity, political and religious dynamics, and intersecting global histories remain ill understood and underrepresented. More fundamentally, the concepts through which we understand the contemporary world were built largely without reference to Asia, which makes serious engagement with these regions central to any adequate social theory. Through careful study of Asia’s sociocultural complexity, we critically engage with and extend established theoretical frameworks, interrogating Western-centric perspectives and their attendant assumptions. A distinctive strength of our approach is close attention to the gap between lived practice and stated accounts – what people do versus what they say they do – an aspect many other disciplines are unable to capture. Long-term ethnographic and historical research lets us develop conceptual tools that better account for how people make sense of and organise their worlds. In doing so, we open up new ways of imagining how societies can be arranged by revealing that forms of social life often taken as fixed or universal are, in fact, historically and culturally variable – and therefore open to change.

ISA’s work is guided by four commitments that define how we approach research and activities at our institute: rigour and quality, the willingness to challenge assumptions, collaboration, and academic independence.