Research

Berkeley Anthropology research is global in scope and includes everything from studies of biotechnology laboratories in California to the earliest European cities. Archaeologists explore the impact of digital technologies on how people learn about the past, changes in plant use and agriculture in the Pacific and elsewhere, and the forces that shaped identity in the Americas in the centuries of European expansion, the African diaspora, and their consequences. Biological anthropologists examine the evolution of human cognition and the long-term histories of health over the life course. Sociocultural anthropologists engage in studies of global health, changing economy and culture in post-socialist societies, language practices in traditional, historic, and contemporary settings, and the ways that Islamic societies engage with civil institutions. Nothing is off-limits for Berkeley anthropologists whose research sketches out the contours of an emerging discipline.

Faculty Research Projects

Sabrina Agarwal, Biological Anthropology, Skeletal Biology Lab

Sabrina Agarwal's research focuses on age and sex-related changes in bone quantity and quality. She has examined age-related changes in cortical bone microstructure, trabecular architecture, and mineral density in several British archaeological populations, and is currently examining the long-term effect of parity and lactation on the human and non-human primate maternal skeleton, studying samples from Turkey, Japan, and California.

Stanley Brandes, Sociocultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology

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, Folklore, Sociocultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology

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, Sociocultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology

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.

Terrence Deacon, Biological Anthropology, Biology Lab

Terrence Deacon's research combines human evolutionary biology and neuroscience, with the aim of investigating the evolution of human cognition. It extends from laboratory-based cellular-molecular neurobiology to the study of semiotic processes underlying animal and human communication, especially language.  His theoretical interests include the study of evolution-like processes at many levels, including their role in embryonic development, neural signal processing, language change, and social processes, and focusing especially on how these different processes interact and depend on each other. In addition, he has a long-standing interest in developing a scientific semiotics that could contribute to both linguistic theory and cognitive neuroscience, fueled by a career-long interest in the ideas of the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce.

Mariane Ferme, Sociocultural Anthropology

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.

Junko Habu, Archaeology, East Asian Archaeology Laboratory

Junko Habu's research focuses primarily on the study of prehistoric Jomon hunter-gatherers on the Japanese archipelago. She has tended to adopt an ecological framework with an emphasis on the study of subsistence and settlement, while not dismissing the importance of non-ecological factors such as historical contingency and human agency.

William F. Hanks, Sociocultural Anthropology

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.

Christine Hastorf, Archaeology, Archaeobotany Laboratory

Christine Hastorf focuses on social life, political change, agricultural production, foodways, and the methodologies that lead to a better understanding of the past through the study of plant-use. She has written on agricultural production, cooking practices and what shifts in these suggest about social relations, gender relations surrounding plant use, the rise of complex society, political change and the symbolic use of plants in the legitimation of authority, fuel use and related symbolism, and plant domestication as part of social identity construction and ritual and social identity. She is particularly interested in wild plant use as compared to domesticates, identifying the stages in plant processing, their participation in social construction, and especially their participation and reflection of the symbolic and the political, in addition to the playing out of the concept of culture in the natural world.

Cori Hayden, Sociocultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology

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, Sociocultural Anthropology

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, Sociocultural Anthropology

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.

Rosemary Joyce, Archaeology, Central American Archaeology Laboratory

Rosemary Joyce's research is concerned with questions about the ways prehispanic inhabitants of Central America employed material things in actively negotiating their place in society. She is especially interested in the use of representational imagery to create and reinforce gendered identities, especially in Classic Maya monumental art and glyphic texts, and Formative period monumental and small-scale images. She specializes in the study of ceramics, including analysis of the functional implications of vessel distributions, and of the symbolism of representational pottery vessels and figurines, and also has conducted landscape-scale research on settlement patterns and more recently, senses of place.

Patrick Kirch, Archaeology, Oceanic Archaeology Laboratory

Patrick Kirch is interested in the origins and diversification of the cultures and peoples of the Pacific, in the evolution of complex sociopolitical formations (especially "chiefdoms"), in prehistoric as well as ethnographic subsistence systems (especially those involving some form of intensification), and in the reciprocal interactions between indigenous peoples and the island ecosystems of the Pacific. He is engaged in inter-disciplinary collaboration with ecologists, soil scientists, paleobotanists, and quantitative modelers. A continuing focus has been on the Lapita Cultural Complex of the western Pacific, widely regarded as the "foundation" culture underlying the later diversity of island Melanesian and Polynesian cultures. A long-term field program in the Kahikinui district on the island of Maui focuses on protohistoric transformations in environmentally marginal landscapes. Another on-going project is an archaeological study of the remote Mangareva Archipelago in French Polynesia.

Kent G. Lightfoot, Archaeology, California Archaeology Laboratory

Kent Lightfoot's general research interests include North American prehistory, coastal hunter-gatherer societies, the emergence of early village communities, and culture contact between Native peoples and European explorers and colonists. His current work focuses on how indigenous peoples responded to European contact and colonialism, and how the outcomes of these encounters influenced cultural developments in postcolonial contexts. This involves the study of long-term culture change and persistence among coastal Native peoples that transcends prehistoric and historic boundaries. He is currently experimenting with an approach that incorporates a long-term diachronic perspective for comparing and contrasting the spatial organization of daily practices and cultural landscapes of coastal  hunter-gatherer groups before, during, and after culture contact episodes.

Xin Liu, Sociocultural Anthropology

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, Sociocultural Anthropology

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, Sociocultural Anthropology

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, Sociocultural Anthropology

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, Sociocultural Anthropology

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, Sociocultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology

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, Sociocultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology

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."

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Sociocultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology

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'.

Kojun "Jun" Sunseri, Archaeology

Jun Sunseri's research focuses on the relationships between colonization and the transformation of indigenous landscapes, foodways, and identities. His work uses multiple, complementary lines of evidence of varied types and spatial scales, including analysis of archaeological faunal and ceramic assemblages related to domestic foodways, as well as GIS analysis of remote sensing, survey, and excavation data to recognize patterning of the tactical and engineered landscapes of the past. His field experiences include New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Mali, and South Africa.

Laurie Wilkie, Archaeology, Historical Archaeology Laboratory

I am an anthropological archaeologist whose research has focused on understanding 19th- and 20th-century life in the United States and Caribbean, combining documentary and material sources of evidence to understand the recent past. Through a focus on household archaeology, my work has focused upon two principal themes: how expressions of social difference—gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sex, socioeconomics and politics—can be understood through the materiality of everyday life; and how a sense of material heritage has shaped human life in the recent past, and continues to do so today.

Alexei Yurchak, Sociocultural Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology

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.