Ramon Sarró studied anthropology at UCL (MSc 1989, PhD 1999) and worked at UCL and the LSE before being the Ioma Evans-Prichard Junior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College in 2000-2002. Between 2002 and 2012, Sarró was Senior Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, as well as a lecturer of Anthropology at the Humanities Department of University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona. He was a Fellow of the Program for Agrarian Studies at Yale in 2010-11, before joining Oxford in 2012. Since 2009 he has also been a member of the French network REASOPO (Réseau européen d’analyse de sociétés politiques).

Sarró has conducted field research in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Portugal (among African diasporas), Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is the author of the award-winning The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone (International African Institute 2009) and co-editor, with A. Pedroso de Lima, of Terrenos Metropolitanos: Desafios Metodológicos (ICS 2007), with D. Berliner of Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches (Berghahn 2007), and with R. Blanes and M. Balkenhol of Atlantic Perspectives: Places, Memories and Spirits (Berghahn, 2020). 

He has directed the EU (NORFACE) programme "Recognizing Christianity: How African Migrants Redefine the European Religious Heritage” (2007-2010), and has been the British PI of the programme “Currents of Faith, Places of Memory”, an EU (HERA) consortium (2013-1016), for which he conducted 9 months of fieldwork in Angola. In 2010, together with Simon Coleman (Toronto), he created the annual review Religion and Society: Advances in Research (Berghahn). 

Sarró has worked on the religious and political dimensions of social change in Africa and the diaspora, as well as on the manifestations of prophetic imagination and on material culture (including its iconoclastic destruction). His interest in the creative aspects of prophetic imagination led to a decade of research on the invention of the Kongo prophetic alphabet known as “Mandombe” and collaborations with its inventor, the late Wabeladio Payi. A book on Wabeladio Payi and his invention of Mandombe is now available (The Invention of an African Alphabet: Writing, Art, and Kongo Culture in the DRC, Cambridge UP 2023). 

Following up his long engagement with Baga-speaking communities of coastal Guinea, Sarró has recently been the PI of the international project “Mangroves and Aluminium”, funded by the John Fell Fund large grants award scheme (2018-21), in which team of researchers from Europe and Guinea (Conakry) have been assessing the impact of aluminium mining upon the mangrove-rice farming communities of the Guinean coast (Baga and beyond Baga), a region he has been familiar with since 1992. In the neighbouring country of Guinea-Bissau, Sarró has been involved in the revitalization of the Ethnographic National Museum of Bissau, an institution created in 1987 but that had disappeared during the civil war of 1998-99. Based on old photographs, Sarró and a team of researchers have reconstructed the history of the museum and managed to re-create it in the capital of the West African country. A book in Portuguese, funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation, narrates the research and shows the images digitally recuperated (O Museu Nacional Etnográfico da Guiné-Bissau: Imagens para uma História, Porto 2018).

In between 2012-2014, together with Dr Marina P. Temudo (University of Lisbon), Sarró directed a research project (‘The prophetess and the rice farmer’) in which for several years they conducted research on the prophetic movement Kyangyang (‘shadows’) in Guinea-Bissau. Based on their project, film maker and anthropologist Roger Canals (University of Barcelona) directed the film “Chasing Shadows: the revitalization of a prophetic movement in Guinea-Bissau” (2019), which captures the material works of prophetic imagination among mangrove rice famers. The film is available in the Journal of Anthropological Films.

In 2021 Sarró had the twin honour of being invited to deliver the ‘Lévi-Strauss Lecture’ at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the “Jorge Dias Memorial Lecture” at the University of Lisbon. Both are now available and deal with different aspects of his interest in prophetic imagination.

He is currently a guest coordinating researcher at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa.