Friday, April 7 and Saturday, April 8 2006 |
discussants
Jim Ferguson (Co-Keynote and Panel Discussant) Professor Ferguson’s research has been conducted in Lesotho and Zambia, and has engaged a broad range of theoretical and ethnographic issues. A central theme running through it has been a concern with the political, broadly conceived, and with the relation between specific social and cultural processes and the abstract narratives of “development” and “modernization” through which such processes have so often been known and understood. A book of Ferguson's essays on issues of globalization and governmentality in contemporary Africa (Global Shadows: Essays on Africa in the Neoliberal World Order) will be published by Duke University Press in early 2006. The essays address a range of specific topics, ranging from “structural adjustment,” the crisis of the state, and the emergence of new forms of government-via-NGO, to the question of the changing social meaning of “modernity” for colonial and postcolonial urban Africans. He is now beginning a new research project in South Africa, exploring the emergence of new problematics of poverty and social policy under conditions of neoliberalism. |||top
Anna Tsing (Co-Keynote and Panel Discussant, Stanford Alumna) Professor Tsing’s teaching specialties include feminist anthropology, Southeast Asia, ethnography, and social theory. Her areas of research are politics and culture in Indonesia, rainforest ecology, gender in the US with geographic foci in Indonesia and the United States. Professor Tsing’s most recent book is entitled Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection ( Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). Here, Professor Tsing develops “friction” as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world. Providing a portfolio of methods to study global interconnections, Professor Tsing shows how curious and creative cultural differences are in the grip of worldly encounter, and how much is overlooked in contemporary theories of the global. |||top
Tom Boellstorff (Panel Discussant, Stanford Alumnus) Coeditor of Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language ( University of Illinois Press, 2004), Professor Boellstorff’s recent book is The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005) The Gay Archipelago is the first book-length exploration of the lives of gay men in Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation and home to more Muslims than any other country. Based on a range of field methods, it explores how Indonesian gay and lesbian identities are shaped by nationalism and globalization. Yet the case of gay and lesbian Indonesians also compels us to ask more fundamental questions about how we decide when two things are "the same" or "different." The book thus examines the possibilities of an "archipelagic" perspective on sameness and difference. |||top
Paulla Ebron (Panel Discussant) Professor Ebron joined the department in 1992 and is the author of Performing Africa, a work based on her research in The Gambia that traces the significance of West African praise-singers in transnational encounters. A second project focuses on tropicality and regionalism as it ties West Africa and the U.S. Georgia Sea Islands in a dialogue about landscape, memory and political uplift. This project is entitled, "Making Tropical Africa in the Georgia Sea Islands." Professor Ebron's interests include culture as a commodity, memory and history, feminism and difference and performance. |||top
Harry Elam (Panel Discussant) Harry J. Elam, Jr. is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities; the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education; Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts; Director of the Committee on Black Performing Arts and the Chair of the Drama Department at Stanford University. He is author of and editor of six books, Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka; The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Winner of the 2005 Errol Hill Award from the American Society of Theatre Research); and coeditor of four books, African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader; Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama; The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millenium; and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Performance and Popular Culture. His articles have appeared in American Drama, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly as well as journals in Taiwan and Poland and several critical anthologies. Professor Elam is also the outgoing editor of Theatre Journal and on the editorial boards of Atlantic Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Modern Drama. He was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in 2005. In addition to his scholarly work, he has directed professionally for over eighteen years: most notably, he directed Tod, the Boy Tod by Talvin Wilks for the Oakland Ensemble Company, and for TheatreWorks in Palo Alto California, he directed Jar the Floor by Cheryl West and Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleague, which was nominated for nine Bay Area Circle Critics Awards and was the winner of DramaLogue Awards for Best Production, Best Design, Best Ensemble Cast and Best Direction. He has directed several of August Wilson's plays, including Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Fences, the latter of which won eight Bay Area “Choice” Awards. He received his AB from Harvard College in 1978 and his Ph.D. in Dramatic Arts from the University of California Berkeley in 1984. |||top
Johannes Fabian (Co-Keynote and Panel Discussant) Johannes Fabian received a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology in 1969 from the University of Chicago. He currently serves as a member of the Amsterdam School of Social Research at the University of Amsterdam. His research interest areas include cultural knowledge systems (mythology, religious doctrines, kinship systems, cosmologies) primarily in francophone Africa. He is currently a fellow in the Stanford Humanities Center, working on Closing House: A Late Ethnography. This project is built around an ethnographic text, consisting of a long conversation in Swahili with Kahenga Mukonkwa, a Congolese healer and practitioner of magic (recorded in Lubumbashi, Congo, in September, 1974). Fabian will reflect on the situation in which he finds himself, facing the need to clean up, as it were, a vast store of ideas and materials that have accumulated during four decades. "Late ethnography" evokes practical and theoretical issues, among them temporal distance to field research ("ethnography and memory"), the problematic distinction between ethnography and historiography, and the allegation implied in post-colonial critique that it may be too late to write ethnographies. |||top
Akhil Gupta (Panel Discussant, Stanford Alumnus) Professor Gupta's teaching interests include the state in developing societies, political economy and postcolonialism, the history of globalization, environmental history and identities, nationalism, applied anthropology and the discourse of development, South Asian ethnography, history of anthropological theory, and political anthropology. Research interests are currently focused on a project on the ethnography of the state in India and environmental history. Akhil Gupta previously taught at the University of Washington's School of International Studies (1987-1989). Editor of the forthcoming The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (with Aradhana Sharma), Blackwell Publishing. |||top
Liisa Malkki (Panel Discussant) Professor Malkki is interested in the contemporary rethinking of the concepts of culture, identity, and the nation; in internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and human rights discourses as transnational cultural forms; in the social production of historical memory and the uses of history; and in exile, displacement, racism, and the political imagination of “foreignness” as key phenomena of our time. Her field research has focused principally on the ways in which political violence and exile may produce transformations of historical consciousness and national identity among displaced people. Her recent research includes interrelationships among nationalism, internationalism, and Finnish missions in Namibia. She was a fellow in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 2000-2001. |||top
Bill Maurer (Panel Discussant, Stanford Alumnus) Professor Maurer's research interrogates deeply-held beliefs about the nature of law and economy. Studies of globalization have sparked heated, and, by now, familiar debate over whether the free movement of money has eroded state sovereignty. The etheral character of modern money makes it seem more intangible at the same time that the adage that money makes the world go around may be truer than ever. But the distinction between state and market remains relatively untouched. Maurer's research queries narratives of globalization's effects by looking into its fabrication, through the entanglements of subjects and objects of law, property and value that make it up. His first book, on the colonial transformation of the British Virgin Islands from a backwater of small scale farmers and traders to a booming offshore financial services center, led him to question the cultural ramifications of finance capital, the legal creation of objects of property held to “move” in new transnational circuits, and the conceptions of mobility animating contemporary financial forms. Maurer is interested in the impact of financial globalization on places like the British Virgin Islands which are so intimately caught up in it. He has been looking at the way Caribbean tax havens market themselves to international investors—wizarding up images more reminiscent of the British Empire than of Club Med—and asking questions about how those images rebound into people's self-perceptions. |||top
William Mazzarella (Panel Discussant) Professor Mazzarella writes and teaches on mass media, globalization, public culture and consumerism, critical theory, commodity aesthetics, and post-coloniality in contemporary India. His book, Shoveling Smoke (Duke, 2003), is an ethnography of the Bombay advertising business and its role in the rise and elaboration of mass consumerism in India in the 1980s and 1990s. The book develops a general theory of how the production and circulation of ‘commodity images’ mediates the local and the global, affect and discourse, image and text. Mr. Mazzarella is currently working on a series of projects at the intersection of publicity, politics, censorship, and the genealogy of ‘the masses’. |||top
Lynn Meskell (Panel Discussant) Professor Meskell’s current research interests include Egyptian archaeology, South African heritage, identity and sociopolitics, gender and feminism, and ethics. Lynn views contemporary archaeology as an anthropology of the past, a contextual and nuanced engagement with ancient culture that mirrors the ethnographic project. In using the materiality of the past and rich documentary or ethnohistoric sources, Lynn's work aims to explore the constitution of the social world and of individual subjects. Moving beyond ancient contexts, she asserts that the past is also crucial in the forging of modern identities whether national, ethnic, religious, or social. The production of the past, whether in scholarly narratives or crafted through field practice, has contemporary ramifications and entails an ethical responsibility in the present. As founding editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology, Lynn has attempted to forge a vehicle for this dialogue, bringing together a wide range of scholars from diverse fields to constitute the editorial panel (feminists, historians, social theorists, and ethnographers). |||top
Diane Nelson (Panel Discussant, Stanford Alumna) Professor Nelson began fieldwork in Guatemala in 1985 exploring the impact of civil war on highland indigenous communities with a focus on the more than 100,000 people made into refugees and 200,000 people murdered in what the United Nations has called genocidal violence. Since then her research has sought to understand the causes and effects of this violence, including the destruction and reconstruction of community life In A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (University of California Press 1999) Professor Nelson describes the relationship between the Guatemalan state and the Mayan cultural rights movement. Her new project grows from her interests in cultural studies and cyborg anthropology and explores science and technology development in Guatemala and Latin America more generally. She is focusing on laboratory and clinical research on vector and blood-borne diseases like malaria and dengue and the intersection of this knowledge production with health care in the midst of neo-liberal reforms and popular demands. In the summer of 2003 she began new fieldwork on this interest in Venezuela, while continuing her research in Guatemala. |||top
David Palumbo-Liu (Co-Keynote and Panel Discussant) David Palumbo-Liu is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He received both his undergraduate and graduate training at the University of California, Berkeley, obtaining undergraduate degrees in Comparative Literature (English and French) and what was then called "Oriental Languages" (major field, Chinese). His graduate work focused on Chinese literature and on literary criticism and theory. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Berkeley in 1988. In 1990, he joined the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford. Part of his duties was to help establish Asian American Studies. He was a founding faculty member of Stanford's Program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE), which was established in 1997, along with a research center (Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity). He currently directs the Program in Asian American Studies, and is an affiliate member of member of East Asian Studies. From 1999 to 2005 he served as director of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. During that period he helped initiate and organize major conferences on Rational Choice Theory and the Humanities and World-Systems Analysis, among other events. Invited speakers included Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jon Elster, Kenneth Arrow, Regenia Gagnier, John Dupre, Immanuel Wallerstein, Bruce Robbins, Linda Hutcheon, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Anna Tsing, Michael Watts, Michael Hardt, and many others. |||top
Ananya Roy (Panel Discussant) Professor Roy teaches in the fields of comparative urban studies and development planning. She holds a B.A. (1992) in Comparative Urban Studies from Mills College, a M.C.P. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. From 1993 to 1998, she was Executive Coordinator of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE), a research organization housed in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. In 1996, she was a visiting lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Mills College, teaching courses in urban sociology. |||top
Suzana Sawyer (Panel Discussant, Stanford Alumna) 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. |||top
Aradhana Sharma (Panel Discussant, Stanford Alumna) Professor Sharma is co-editor of The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (Blackwell, 2005) with Professor Akhil Gupta. The volume brings together classic theoretical texts and cutting-edge ethnographic analyses of specific state institutions, practices, and processes and outlines an anthropological framework for rethinking future study of “the state” while also focusing on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, and representations that constitute the “state”. |||top
Eric Sheppard (Panel Discussant) Eric Sheppard is a Geography Professor at the University of Minnesota, visiting Stanford for the 2005-2006 academic year. Professor Sheppard’s interests include economic geography and political economy; the geography of globalization and development; urban systems change and urban policy debates; networking, telecommunications and geography; GIS and society; environmental justice. He seeks to develop general explanations for the spatial organization and dynamics of economic activities in capitalist societies, and to determine the importance of a geographical perspective to such theories. Economists recently have rediscovered economic geography as a place to apply economic theory, but his research shows that when theories fully incorporate the spatial dimension of society then economic theory must be substantially modified. A geographical approach can capture the complex evolution of economic landscapes and the various non-economic processes affecting economic change. Recent publication include (editor, with R. B. McMaster) 2002. Scale and Geographic Inquiry. Oxford: Blackwell, (editor, with T. Barnes, J. Peck and A. Tickell) 2002. A Reader in Economic Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. (2002) and (editor, with T. Barnes) 2000 A Companion to Economic Geography. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. |||top
Kamala Visweswaran (Panel Discussant, Stanford Alumna) Professor Visweswaran is interdisciplinary in her work. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (University of Minnesota Press: 1994), Professor Visweswaran's first book, explored the intersections of ethnography and literature. The relationship of anthropology to history underlies her book, "Family Subjects: Women, Feminism, Indian Nationalism," which re-conceptualizes women's role in the twentieth-century Indian nationalist movement through an ethnographic analysis of historical narrative. |||top
Kath Weston (Panel Discussant, Stanford Alumna) Kath Weston is a socio-cultural anthropologist who serves as Director of Studies for the Committee on Degrees in Women's Studies at Harvard University. She is a member of the National Writers Union and the author of several books, including Families We Choose, Render Me, Gender Me, Long Slow Burn, and the 2002 release Gender in Real Time. Among her forthcoming publications is an essay on the race/class politics of blood transfusion. Professor Weston's latest field research explores surveillance practices and what it means to live poor in a rich country. Her research interests include political economy; "intersections" of gender with race, class, and other aspects of identity; temporality; narrative; kinship; sexuality; methodology; and science metaphors in the social sciences. |||top
Hayden White (Panel Discussant) Hayden White is University Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Professor White’s work dwells on the interstices between discourse theory, literary criticism, historiography and narrativity. He is the author of many articles and books, which have had a profound influence on the practice and conceptualization of all the humanities disciplines. The most famous of those are: Metahistory: The Historical Imagination (Johns Hopkins, 1973), Tropics of Discourse (Johns Hopkins, 1978), The Content of the Form (Johns Hopkins, 1987), and Figural Realism (Johns Hopkins, 1997). At Stanford, professor White teaches: Present Pasts: History, Fiction, Temporality (co-taught with Amir Eshel) and The Theory of the Text. |||top
Eric Worby (Panel Discussant, Stanford Alumus)
Sylvia Yanagisako (Panel Discussant) Sylvia Yanagisako's latest book, Culture and Capital: Producing Italian Family Capitalism (Princeton University Press) examines the cultural processes through which a technologically-advanced, Italian manufacturing industry has been produced. She is currently working on a collaborative ethnographic study of the cultural production of transnational capitalism by entrepreneurs in the Italian and Chinese textile industries. Professor Yanagisako's previous publications include Transforming the Past: Kinship and Tradition among Japanese Americans (Stanford University Press, 1985); Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a United Analysis (Stanford University Press, 1987), which she co-edited with Professor Emerita Jane Collier; and Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis (Routledge Press, 1994), which she co-edited with her colleague Professor Carol Delaney. Professor Yanagisako has served as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology and as the Chair of the Program in Feminist Studies at Stanford. She received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching for 1992. |||top |
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