People in Sociocultural Anthropology

Gerald Berreman, Professor Emeritus
Stanley Brandes, Professor: Stanley Brandes has studied Mexico's Day of the Dead from an historical and ethnographic perspective, including Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. He is also the author of work on Alcoholics Anonymous in Mexico City, an intensive study over nearly two years of a single group of recuperating alcoholic men, all from working class, migrant backgrounds. His work on photography and anthropology, particularly the ways in which ethnographic photographs, intentionally or not, have communicated information and impressions about the Other has been carried out primarily in Spain.
Charles Briggs, Professor: Charles Briggs combines linguistic and medical anthropology with social/cultural anthropology and folkloristics. He has focused on using a variety of critical approaches in exploring how precarious poetics and social constructions of language, communication, and media structure and are structured by everyday life in zones of racialization, power, danger, and often death.
Lawrence Cohen, Professor: Lawrence Cohen's primary field is the critical study of medicine, health, and the body. His book No Aging in India is about Alzheimer's disease, the body and the voice in time, and the cultural politics of senility. His two current projects are India Tonite, which examines homoerotic identification and representation in the context of political and market logics in urban north India, and The Other Kidney about the nature of immunosuppression and its accompanying global traffic in organs for transplant.
Mariane Ferme, Associate Professor: Mariane Ferme's research interests include phenomenological approaches to questions of identity, personhood, and modernity especially in Africa, within the larger fields of political and religious anthropology. She focuses on the mutually constitutive relationship between everyday practices on the one hand, and qualities of persons and the world they inhabit on the other hand, and how history--particularly colonial history--has shaped the very parameters within which the world can be experienced and changed in postcolonial, modern Africa.
Marc Goodwin, Visiting Lecturer
Nelson Graburn, Professor Emeritus
William F. Hanks, Professor: William F. Hanks studies the history and ethnography of Yucatan, Mexico, and Yucatec Maya language and culture, including early modern Spain and Spanish as a necessary step towards understanding the colonial formation of Yucatan and New Spain. He examines the organization and dynamics of routine language use (semantics, pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics and the social foundations of speech practices). He has studied ritual practice, comparative shamanisms, and the relations between religion and health care in rural Mexico. His most recent work concerns the colonial history of Yucatan and New Spain, with a special emphasis on missionization and the emergence of colonial discourse genres.
Cori Hayden, Associate Professor: Corinne Hayden is a cultural anthropologist whose work has primarily explored how claims to and about biological material and knowledge help shape contemporary social imaginaries of participation and marginalization. Her earlier writings concern reproductive technologies, kinship, and lesbian families in the US. She is currently exploring the ethics and practice of clinical trials in Latin America, as well as the rise of an ethic of benefit-sharing in human genetic research.
Charles Hirschkind, Associate Professor: My research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the Middle East, North America, and Europe. Taking contemporary developments within the traditions of Islam as my primary focus, I have explored how various religious practices and institutions have been revised and renewed both by modern norms of social and political life, and by the styles of consumption and culture linked to global mass media practices. My first book, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Columbia 2006), explores how a popular Islamic media form-the cassette sermon-has profoundly transformed the political geography of the Middle East over the last three decades. Based on a year and a half of field research, my study examines how sermon tapes have provided one of the means by which Islamic ethical traditions have been recalibrated to a modern political and technological order, to its noise, forms of pleasure and boredom, but also to its political incitements, its call to citizen participation. Focusing on popular neighborhoods of Cairo, my analysis highlights the pivotal role these tapes now play in an expanding arena of Islamic argumentation and debate-what I call an "Islamic counterpublic." This emergent public arena connects Islamic traditions of ethical discipline to practices of deliberation about the common good, the duties of Muslims as national citizens, and the challenges faced by diverse Muslim communities around the globe.

My second project is a study of the different ways in which Europe's Islamic past inhabits its present, unsettling contemporary efforts to secure Europe's Christian civilizational identity. Taking southern Spain as my focus, I analyze the social and political processes that mediate and sustain an active relation to Europe's Islamic heritage, and the potential impact these processes have on forms of cooperation and responsibility linking Muslim immigrants, Spanish converts, and Andalusian Catholics as subjects of Europe.
James Holston, Professor: James Holston's current research examines the worldwide insurgence of democratic citizenships in the context of global urbanization, especially the generation of insurgent citizenship among the urban working classes in Brazil, as they confront problems of urbanization, land tenure, government regulation, state violence, and misrule of law.
Xin Liu, Professor: Xin Liu's primary research interests concern the condition of life in the contemporary world, with reference to (East) Asia and China and understanding the effects of transnational capital and capitalism in the transformation of (East) Asian societies. Among his research questions are the Chinese modernizing process and its relevance to the discussion of modernity in anthropology; the problem of agency and/or subjectivity in social theory; the practice of everyday (business) life (in China and other Asian societies); the urban question in and of China; time, memory and different ways of being in history; the nature of narrative and its function in the configuration of our senses of self and belonging; the problem of media and imagery; the ideology of science in East Asia and, in particular, in today's China.
Saba Mahmood, Associate Professor: Saba Mahmood's research interests lie in exploring historically specific articulations of secular modernity in postcolonial societies, with particular attention to issues of subject formation, religiosity, embodiment, and gender. Currently she is examining secular-liberal interpretations of Islam in the context of the Middle East and South Asia.
Donald Moore, Associate Professor: Donald Moore's work focuses on power, spatiality, and race, including ethnographic fieldwork on agrarian micro-politics in Eastern Zimbabwe, and the emergent field of the cultural politics of race and nature.
Laura Nader, Professor: Laura Nader's current work focuses on how central dogmas are made and how they work in law, energy science, and anthropology. Her wide range of interests in law has moved from village sites into national and international arenas, including the area of energy and resources and contemporary work on power and control.
Aihwa Ong, Professor: Aihwa Ong's work has always dealt with the particular entanglements of politics, technology, and culture in rapidly changing situations on the Asia Pacific rim. Currently, her work focuses on regimes of governing, technology, and culture that crystallize new meanings and practices of the human. Her field research shifts between sites in Southeast Asia and China in order to track emerging global centers and biotechnical experiments in East Asian modernity.
Stefania Pandolfo, Associate Professor: Stefania Pandolfo studies theories and forms of subjectivity, and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world, investigating narrative, trauma, psychoanalysis and the unconscious, memory, historicity and the hermeneutics of disjuncture, language and poetics, experimental ethnographic writing, anthropology and literature, dreaming and the anthropological study of the imagination, intercultural approaches to different ontologies and systems of knowledge, modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, madness and mental illness. Her current project is a study of emergent forms of subjectivity in Moroccan modernity at the interface of "traditional therapies" and psychiatry/psychoanalysis, exploring theoretical ways to think existence, possibility and creation in a context of referential and institutional instability and in the aftermath of trauma, based on ethnographic research on spirit possession and the "cures of the jinn", and on the experience of madness in a psychiatric hospital setting.
Paul Rabinow, Professor: Paul Rabinow's work has consistently centered on modernity as a problem: problem for those seeking to live with its diverse forms, a problem for those seeking to advance or resist modern projects of power and knowledge. This work has ranged from descendants of a Moroccan saint coping with the changes wrought by colonial and post-colonial regimes, to the wide array of knowledges and power relations entailed in the great assemblage of social planning in France, to my work of the last decade on molecular biology and genomics. His current research centers on developments in post-genomics and molecular diagnostics. It seeks to invent an analytic framework to understand the issues of bio-politics and bio-security. A related research interest is the contemporary moral terrain with special attention to "affect."
Arpita Roy, Visiting Lecturer
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Professor: Nancy Scheper-Hughes' research, writings, and teaching focus on violence, suffering, and premature death as these are experienced on the margins and peripheries of the late modern world. For the last decade she has been involved in a multi-sited, ethnographic, and medical human rights oriented study of the global traffic in humans (living and dead) for their organs to serve the needs and desires of international transplant patients. She continues to conduct research on transitional violence, justice, and reconciliation in the slums , shantytowns, and squatter camps of Brazil and South Africa, in particular the rise of police-supported death squads in neo-liberal democracies in the 'developing world'.
Alexei Yurchak, Associate Professor: Alexei Yurchak's theoretical interests include the analysis of human agency and its interplay with language and discourses of power especially in post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. He is particularly interested in the analysis of how ideologies (political, cultural, national, market, etc.) are projected on and work through language, and what methods of discourse analysis social scientists can use to unpack their discursive power. He is concerned with the cultural shifts brought forth by the collapse of the Soviet ideology, state institutions, and centralized economic principles and the formation of socialist and post-socialist identities and subject positions.
Saleem Al-Bahloly, Graduate Student
Sanuja Mohammad Ali, Graduate Student
Nina Aron, Graduate Student
Samuel Banales, Graduate Student
Nicholas Bartlett, Graduate Student
Gaymon Bennett, Graduate Student
Sunya Berkelman-Rosado, Graduate Student
Leticia Cesarino, Graduate Student
Kun Chen, Graduate Student
Emily Chua, Graduate Student
M George, Graduate Student
E. Mara Green, Graduate Student
Andrew Hao, Graduate Student
Katie Hendy, Graduate Student
Stanley Herman, Graduate Student
Daniel Husman, Graduate Student
Patricia Kubala, Graduate Student
Larisa Kurtovic, Graduate Student
Erin Mahaffey, Graduate Student
Xochiquet Marsilli-Vargas, Graduate Student
Marcus Moore, Graduate Student
Maiko Morimoto, Graduate Student
Mary Murrell, Graduate Student
Kiesha Oliver, Graduate Student
Jeehwan Park, Graduate Student
Jeffrey Piatt, Graduate Student
Eric Plemons, Graduate Student
Peter Rawitscher, Graduate Student
Bruno Reinhardt, Graduate Student
Beatriz Reyes-Cortes, Graduate Student
Timothy Rodriguez, Graduate Student
Amal Sachedina, Graduate Student
Kalim Smith, Graduate Student
Anthony Stavrianakis, Graduate Student
Krystal Strong, Graduate Student
Maki Tanaka, Graduate Student
Bharat Venkat, Graduate Student
Mareike Winchell, Graduate Student
Edoardo Zavarella, Graduate Student
Lisia Zheng, Graduate Student