We write to let you know that our beloved colleague, teacher, and friend, Diane M. Nelson, died last night. We mourn her passing with love, and with admiration for her way of living and scholarship. After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer earlier this year, she entered hospice last week surrounded by her family. A member of our department for twenty-one years, she showed us how to hold onto our commitments to social justice as much as she did how to play. She taught theatrically and wrote poetically, and she… read more about In Memoriam of Diane Nelson (1963-2022) »
The School for Advanced Research (SAR) Winner of the J. I. Staley Prize, 2022 J. Lorand Matory, The Fetish Revisited; Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make (Duke University Press, 2018) In a work of considerable ambition and insight, J. Lorand Matory challenges the traditional Eurocentric view of the "fetish" by showing how it is not only a distorted concept but an implicit accusation that peoples who believe in the power of symbolic objects are irrational and unsophisticated. In so… read more about J. Lorand Matory - Winner of the J. I. Staley Prize 2022 »
Anne-Maria B. Makhulu completed a master’s and a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree at Columbia University before that. She is currently an associate professor of cultural anthropology and African & African American studies at Duke. Makhulu is the author of Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and The Struggle for Home and co-editor of Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectivities. She has several journal special… read more about Anne-Maria Makhulu wins 2022 Dean's Award for Excellence in Mentoring »
Fifty years separate the days when Claudius “C.B.” Claiborne and Michelle Staggers completed their undergraduate degrees at Duke. But a conversation held February 28 made clear that the former student-athletes had plenty of shared experiences, along with a few key differences. Now a professor of business and marketing in the Jesse H. Jones School of Business at Texas Southern University, Claiborne was the first African American basketball player at Duke and earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. Staggers was a member of… read more about Two Former Student-Athletes Discuss Duke History and Hope for the Future »
The Department of Cultural Anthropology mourns the loss of Dr. Paul Farmer, who died today in Rwanda. A 1982 graduate of our program, Dr. Farmer generated a vision for bridging anthropology, social justice, and global health that has inspired our students and our discipline. His is a model for how scholars can make the world a more just and equitable place. We join others in expressing our profound condolences to his family. read more about Dr Paul Farmer, a renowned American physician and co-founder of Partners in Health @PIH, has died aged 62. »
Sophia Goodfriend, a doctoral candidate in Cultural Anthropology, pens an article in Foreign Policy discussing how Israel is honing invasive surveillance technology on Palestinians before it is exported abroad. read more about Sophia Goodfriend: How the Occupation Fuels Tel Aviv’s Booming AI Sector »
How can anthropology cultivate attention—not to what ethnographic listening is, for it undoubtedly varies, but to what ethnographic listening could be? How might this change how we, anthropologists, teach and practice listening? Read more. read more about "Ten Ways to Listen" »
How a Twitter debate about race rejected classical music norms and created space for new forms of appreciation. “Ok, who had the #BeethovenwasBlack on their 2020 plot twist bingo card?” read one tweet. “Allegedly #Beethoven used to powder the f*** out of his skin and used body doubles for portraits. Hopefully he was finessing to get paid the dollars he deserved and it wasn’t from self-hate,” claimed another. “That ‘Beethoven was black!’ thing hasn’t got much convincing evidence. Stop repeating it,” retorted a third.… read more about Anthropology News "Black Beethoven" »
When Michaeline Crichlow moved from her native St. Lucia to upstate New York, she had a lot to learn — and not just in the graduate program she attended at Binghamton University. “I became a Black person not in the Caribbean, but in the United States,” said the professor and interim chair of African & African American Studies. Race wasn’t often discussed in St. Lucia, where the vast majority of the population is Black. The rare times it was, the conversation wasn’t about Black and white, but the Indo-Caribbean peoples… read more about What Decolonization Means »
THE AFTERMATH of the Israel-Hamas war of May 2021 left many unanswered questions but one decisive assessment: the wartime footage shot by Palestinians had been unprecedented. The sense of a media watershed was near universal, from the Twitter feeds of anti-occupation activists to the pages of right-wing Israeli newspapers. Some pundits stressed the newfound velocity of the eyewitness footage, now circulating at unprecedented speeds. Others emphasized videographic volume, including footage shot by Gazans in the very midst… read more about Viral Occupation: Palestine and the Video Revolution »
In December 2020, to the tune of rousing cheers, the first health care workers began getting vaccinated against Covid-19. A year later, the cheers have died down, vaccination rates have plateaued, and the Omicron wave has hit the U.S. with one million daily cases registered during the first week of January 2022. Yet despite the hard work and sacrifices of health care workers, many of them haven’t seen pay raises. As 2022 begins with another wave of infections, it remains imperative to shine a light on working… read more about Omicron Magnifies the Distress in the Health Care Labor System »
One day between his first and second years as a master’s student, Joseph Hiller found himself in Calle Donceles, the historic downtown center of Mexico City, hopping among the many old used bookstores the area was known for. These were the kind of places that had 10-foot-tall bookcases with dusty shelves, collections with endless categories, and stacks of old, unexpected gems—the kind of places he had read about in The Savage Detectives, Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s work about poets in 1970s Mexico City… read more about Latin-American Literary Treasure Hunt? »
Students in “Amazon.com and the Cybereconomy” in Fall 2021 learned more about the e-commerce giant from guest speakers including Amazon executives, warehouse workers, and social critics. They did their own research to produce a website that explores the many dimensions of Amazon’s empire from AWS to the mythologies around founder Jeff Bezos and labor conditions at Amazon fulfillment centers: https://sites.duke.edu/theamazonproject/ read more about The Amazon Project: Students Produce Website about Amazon.com »
From the November 2021 issue of PHDigest, a monthly e-newsletter focused on doctoral students in the social sciences. Student Spotlight: Hannah Borenstein Hannah is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Her dissertation research is an ethnographic project investigating the lives of Ethiopian women long-distance runners navigating a transnational network of coaches, agents, and sponsorship companies. She explores the relationships that emerge between… read more about Student spotlight with Hannah Borenstein »
Online symposium "Frantz Fanon, Sixty Years After" Friday, December 3 12:00PM East You can register via Zoom to attend the symposium online: https://duke.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0sdO2uqjstHNBRoiiFOk__h56L7xtfP87s Frantz Fanon's work has profoundly influenced militants of the Global South and Black Power struggle, factions of the Andean Indigenous guerrillas of the 1980s, and continues to be a vital reference in today’s social movements such as Black Lives Matter.… read more about Frantz Fanon, Sixty Years After »
A veteran professor enjoys Cameron craziness as much as any Blue Devils fan, but says big-time college sports dominate what are supposed to be nonprofit academic institutions. Even at Duke, which considers itself a shining star, there’s academic corner-cutting, rampant commercialization, and some unsettling racial dynamics. Read more. read more about Duke University and the Troubles of College Sports »
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS The American Society of Ethnohistory annually recognizes the outstanding scholarship and contributions of our exceptional members whose lifetime of hard work and dedication to ASE, their outstanding scholarship, and their mentoring of young scholars have been crucial in establishing and maintaining our organization. Although we can never thank them sufficiently for their contributions we hope that recognizing them at our annual meeting will be a partial thank you for their hard work.… read more about Professor Emerita of Cultural Anthropology Irene Silverblatt receives Lifetime Achievement Award »