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Holly High

researcher

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 15, 2026
Entity authorityQ97595099
Source-derived summary

Holly High (born 1976) is an Australian anthropologist specialising in the ethnography of socialist Laos. She is an associate professor at Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation.

Biography

High was born in 1976 near Nimbin, New South Wales.

High conducted fieldwork in Laos, including language learning and documenting a bird flu outbreak. She was a research fellow at the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies (2005–2006) and at Clare Hall, Cambridge from 2010, later becoming a Life Member. She was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Research Award in 2012 and an ARC Future Fellowship in 2020. In 2021 she joined Deakin University.

Research

High's research focuses on the ethnography of socialism in the Lao People's Democratic Republic, with particular attention to gender, reproductive health, and policy. Reviewer Ian G. Baird of the University of Wisconsin–Madison has argued that High was the first scholar to seriously challenge the characterisation of Laos as postsocialist. She is also a public advocate for the discipline of anthropology, appearing regularly on podcasts and in interviews to discuss Lao politics and society.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Holly High” as researcher. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Holly, High and researcher.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1976, 2005, 2006, 2010—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Holly, High and researcher providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Holly High”, the useful work is to connect “researcher” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q97595099. VIAF identifies the subject as 204020227. The Library of Congress control number is n2013209929. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1976, 2005, 2006 and 2010.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Holly High primary sources, Holly High archive and Holly research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Holly High” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.