Cultural Anthropology
Among
the topical interests of the cultural anthropology
faculty are gender and sexuality, culture and
power, modernity and consumption, religion and
ritual, matrilineal societies, human ecology,
pastoralism, applied anthropology, maritime anthropology,
nationalism and ethnic identity, racial constructs,
post-colonialism, and history and memory. Areas
of regional expertise in the department include
Latin America and the Caribbean, Native America,
Atlantic Canada and the Arctic, South Asia, Southeast
Asia, Tibet, East Africa, Polynesia, and Eastern
Europe, as well as their respective diasporas
around the world.
In addition, the cultural anthropology faculty share an interest in globalization, using ethnographic skills to understand the contemporaneous but countervailing forces that encourage both global homogenization and local fragmentation. Processes related to globalization studied by cultural anthropologists and graduate students include the increasingly planetary integration of the economy; the spread of human insecurity with the proliferation of ethnic and religious conflict, violence, crime, disease, and financial volatility; the global depletion and degradation of environmental resources; the impact of tourism and large-scale development projects; the internationalization of environmental, feminist, religious, and human rights movements; the response to democratic structures; the rise of “world cities;” the spread of new information and communication technologies; and the increasingly global flows of popular media, advertising and consumer goods. The cultural anthropology faculty’s interest in processes of globalization, human ecology, and applied anthropology also intersect with areas of specialization in archaeology and biological anthropology.
Cultural Faculty
- Donna Goldstein (website) - Ethnography, political economy, human rights, globalization & etc. of Latin America;
- Kira Hall (website) - Linguistic Anthropology. Department of Linguistics;
- Carla Jones - Globalization, subjectivity & governmentality, critical gender theory of Indonesia
- J. Terrence McCabe - Human adaptations to arid land and savanna ecosystems, pastoralism, East Africa
- Dennis McGilvray - Religion, caste, kinship, and ethnic conflict in South Asia, South India, and Sri Lanka
- J. Russ McGoodwin - Fishing peoples and cultures, resource management, impacts of global change
- Carole Mei McGranahan - Issues of power in local, global, historical contexts in Tibet and the Himalayas
- L. Kaifa Roland - Tourism, globalization, racialized national identities in Cuba, Latin America and the Caribbean
- Paul Shankman - Economic and ecological anthropology of Oceania and contemporary America
- Deward Walker - Ethnographic, ethnohistoric, applied research among Native Americans of Western North America