Friday, April 7 and Saturday, April 8 2006
at the Bechtel International Center
Stanford University

The Anthropology of Global Productions

alumni

Alumni generosity in both scholarship and spirit has been integral to our graduate student conference from the beginning. Stanford Alumni were instrumental in getting our annual event off to a great start last year, and we look forward to their strong participation in this, our second event. As current graduate students, meeting and working with alumni is an invaluable learning opportunity, and we hope that the conference provides an important venue for alumni as well - to reconnect, and keep invigorated their intellectual and personal ties to CASA and Stanford.

 

letters from past alumni

"Thank you for inviting me to the conference last year. I enjoyed it. I had not seen most of my fellow graduate students in many years and it was very interesting for me to see how our intellectual thinking had been shaped by being parts of a cohort set in history. I also enjoyed meeting graduate students both at Stanford and from around the world. ..."

- Phillipe Bourgois, Ph.D 1985

"Let me state at the outset that I think the conference was extremely valuable for graduate students because it provided them with serious feedback on their work of the sort they do not get from most anthropology meetings. For students from my University, at any rate, it was an outstanding experience, and I think it was helpful for the whole group of students to interact in what was an important intellectual experience. ..."

- Carol Smith, Ph.D. 1989

 

past alumni participants (2005 Conference)

Phillippe Bourgois, Donald Donham, Helen Gremillion, Jean Jackson, Martha Menchaca, Lisa Rofel, Roger Rouse, Suzana Sawyer, Carol Smith

 

Philippe Bourgois (Ph.D. 1985)
Professor, UC San Francisco department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine

Philippe Bourgois has conducted fieldwork in Central America (Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Belize) and in the urban United States (East Harlem--New York and San Francisco). In Central America his research addresses the political mobilization of ethnicity, immigration and labor relations, political violence, popular resistance, and the social dislocation of street children. His research in the United States confronts inner-city social suffering and critiques the political economy and cultural contours of U.S. apartheid. He is also addressing gender power relations, and the intersections between structural and intimate violence. His most recent work focuses on substance abuse, violence, homelessness, and HIV-prevention.

Recent Publicatons

  • Scheper-Hughes N and Bourgois P eds. Violence in  War and Peace: An Anthology . (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 2004).
  • In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Second Updated Edition.

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Donald Donham (Ph.D. 1979)
Professor, UC Davis department of Anthropology

Professor Donham’s principal area of interest, over the past twenty years, has been understanding forms of power as they change over time, and the ways that economics systems intertwine with cultural forms in those transformations. He is particularly interested in historical methodology as it applies to ethnography, marxist and post-marxist social theories, the history of cultural anthropology, and the ways that race, gender, sexuality, and class interact in transnational settings.

Recent Publications

  • History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
  • Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

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Helen Gremillion (Ph.D. 1996)
Associate Professor, Indiana University Bloomington Department of Gender Studies
Peg Zeglin Brand Chair in Gender Studies

Professor Gremillion’s research and teaching interests include gender and science, constructionist theories of the body and of sexualities, medical anthropology, consumer culture, and feminist ethnographies. Her book “Feeding Anorexia: Gender and Power at a Treatment Center” (Duke University Press, 2003) shows that therapies for anorexia participate unwittingly in cultural ideals of gender, physical fitness, individualism, and family life that contribute to anorexia's conditions of possibility. Her current research analyzes therapeutic modalities that apply theories of gender and power elaborated in poststructuralist accounts of identity formation.

Recent Publications

  • Feeding Anorexia: Gender and Power at a Treatment Center (Duke: Duke University Press, 2003) .

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Jean Jackson (Ph.D. 1972)
Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Anthropology

Jean E. Jackson has carried out fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala and, beginning in 1968, in the Vaupés region in southeastern Colombia, also known as the Central Northwest Amazon. Her Latin American research interests included small-scale societies, kinship and marriage, gender, and anthropological linguistics, in particular multilingualism; her 1983 book, The Fish People: Linguistic Exogamy and Tukanoan Identity in Northwest Amazonia, focused on these topics. Her continuing interest in social and ethnic identity led her to turn her attention to indigenous mobilizing in Colombia, and has resulted in fourteen articles and book chapters, as well as a book co-edited with Kay B. Warren on Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation and the State in Latin America, published by U. Texas Press in January, 2003. A long-standing interest in the epistemology of ethnography led to a 1985 research project in which she interviewed 70 anthropologists about their fieldnotes practices; two articles resulted from this research. She also has published several pieces on gender, and two self-reflexive pieces: one on the role of gender in her fieldwork, the other, published in Colombia, on her 30 years of research in the Vaupés. She returned to medical anthropology in 1986, carrying out NIMH-funded ethnographic research in an inpatient chronic pain center in New England. Seven shorter publications on this research have been published, as well as " Camp Pain": Talking with Chronic Pain Patients (2000, U Penn).

Recent Publications

  • Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation and the State in Latin America, co-editor (Austin: University. Texas Press, 2003).
  • " Camp Pain": Talking with Chronic Pain Patients (Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press, 2000 ).

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Martha Menchaca (Ph.D. 1987)
Associate Professor, UT Austin department of Anthropology

Professor Mechaca’s interests include social anthropology, ethnicity, gender, oral history, and Chicano studies: US/Mexican culture, Latin America. Her book, Recovering history, constructing race : the Indian, black, and white roots of Mexican Americans was published in 2001.

Recent Publications

  • Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).

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Lisa Rofel (Ph.D. 1989)
Associate Professor, UC Santa Cruz department of Anthropology

Lisa Rofel has consistently brought feminist, postcolonial and Marxist poststructuralist approaches to bear on questions of modernity, postsocialism, capitalism, desire, queer identities, and transnational encounters. She has written extensively about China. Rofel was trained in East Asian History at Brown University in the 1970s and Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University in the 1980s. Her publications include: Desiring China (forthcoming, Duke University Press), which addresses how public culture events in China produce desiring subjects, including soap operas, gay public life, cosmopolitan practices, and financial news; Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in Post-Mao China, which addresses how modernity is not a universal logic or an evolutionary tale of progress but a disparate and shifting set of discourses and practices about otherness. Rofel is currently at work on a collaborative project on the Twenty-first Century Silk Road between Italy and China (with Sylvia Yanagisako), a co-edited volume on Beyond the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Queer Chinese Politics (with Petrus Liu) and a co-edited volume on contemporary documentary filmmaking in China (with Chris Berry).

Recent Publications

  • "Modernity's Masculine Fantasies," In Bruce Knauft (ed.), Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies. (Bloomington: Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.)
  • "Discrepant Modernities and Their Discontents," Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 9(3):637-649. 2001.

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Roger Rouse (Ph.D. 1989)
Assistant Professor, UC Davis department of Anthropology

My research is concerned broadly with theoretical and empirical issues related to the cultural politics of class dynamics. I am particularly interested in exploring how the restructuring of capitalism along neoliberal lines has been played out and experienced over the last three decades in Mexico and the United States. I have pursued these interests ethnographically through research with people involved in migration between rural west-central Mexico and various parts of the United States, most notably California’s Silicon Valley. This research has led me to continuing work on the ways we theorize and conceptualize processes of migration, with a particular emphasis on the significance of class trajectories and processes of subjectification, the interplay of class and gender dynamics, and the formation of transnational social fields. Reflecting my interest in work at the intersection of anthropology and cultural studies, I am also engaged in a broader, non-ethnographic project that relates shifts in dominant forms of cultural production in the United States since the early 1980s to the growing emphasis on specifically neoliberal and transnational processes of capital accumulation.

Recent Publications

  • In a Moving World: Transnational Migration, Class Conflict and the Politics of Family Life. Book to be published by Princeton University Press.
  • USA Today: Producing Subjects in Transnational Times. Book in progress.

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Suzana Sawyer (Ph.D. 1997)
Associate Professor, UC Davis Department of Anthropology

Professor Sawyer’s research examines struggles over resources in the Ecuadorian Amazon, focusing specifically on conflicts over land and petroleum development among indigenous peoples, the state, and multinational oil companies. Her book, Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador ( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) explores how lowland peoples have challenged neoliberal economic policies to privatize their lands and increase petroleum production within indigenous claimed territory. It suggests that struggles over resource use (i.e. the control of land and oil operations) are simultaneously struggles over identity and territoriality; that is, practices that disrupted the neo-liberal state's agenda and multinational petro-business also disrupted elite notions of the nation and senses of belonging. In a country such as Ecuador scarred by inequalities of race, class, and gender, struggles over resources use represent challenges to the legitimacy of an historically exclusionary state, as well as, occasions for redefining the terms of citizenship, nation, and sovereignty in a globalizing world.

Dr. Sawyer will be a discussant at the 2006 Graduate Student Conference: The Anthropology of Global Productions

Recent Publications

  • Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)
  • “Subterranean Techniques: Corporate Environmentalism, Oil Operations, and Social Injustice in the Ecuadorian Rain Forest” in In Search of the Rain Forest, Candace Slater ed. (Duke University Press, 2003)

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Carol Smith (Ph.D. 1972)
Professor and Chair, UC Davis department of Anthropology

My research has long covered political and cultural relations in Guatemala and Central America. My edited book, Guatemalan Indians and the State, 1540-1988, illustrates the kinds of approaches I take, a combination of historical, ethnographic, and political views of the same phenomena. I have long been concerned to analyze the various kinds of encounters and struggles between the institutions of the Guatemalan state and the indigenous communities. I have recently broadened my interest to cover other Central American states and populations.

Recent Publications

  • Resena de la encrucijada entre el desarrollo capitalista y la creacion de una nacion, Tomo 1: Mercados, centros urbanos y el subdesarrollo en Guatemala. C.A. Smith, ed. Guatemala: Cirma. (In press.)
  • Resena de la encrucijada entre el desarrollo capitalista y la creacion de una nacion, Tomo I: Clases culturas, y naciones en Guatemala. Guatemala: CIRMA. (In press.)
  • The Contradictions of Mestizaje in Central America. In Memorias del Mestizaje: Cultura Politica en America Central, 1920 al Presente, Dario Euraque, Jeff Gould, and Charles Hale, editors. Guatemala: CIRMA.

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