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| From the November 2003
Anthropology News
What Draws Anthropologists to Brown Stacy Lathrop Imagine a place presided by a visionary leader committed to anthropology. A place where anthropologists fully collaborate with economists, political scientists, sociologists and historians, breaking down disciplinary barriers, while engaging in the development of timely research; where these collaborating scholars meet with NGO representatives, international policymakers and activists to productively address contemporary global issues, and where anthropologists figure integrally in directly shaping them. Brown university, and particularly its Watson Institute for International Studies, is currently such a place according to anthropologists David Kertzer, Kay Warren and Catherine Lutz. In fact, for Warren and Lutz, being a part of such an exciting place was recently a deciding factor in accepting joint appointments there as Professors of Anthropology and International Studies. Watson Institute for International
Studies Kertzer himself, with his colleague Dominique Arel, has been bringing fresh anthropological perspectives to the Politics, Culture and Identity program’s Census and Identity research project examining how states use their censuses to divide their populations into identity categories, and the political and cultural significance of the resulting struggles taking place. They are currently studying the 2002 Russian census and how Russians are dealing with the old Soviet policy of dividing its population into separate “nationalities” in collaboration with the Institute of Ethnology in Moscow, and its director, anthropologist Valery Tishkov. Such cross-national collaborations might work, speculates Lutz, since, unlike many international programs that take a US/Europe-centered perspective on global issues, scholars at the Watson Institute take a “non-parochial” approach; or in Warren’s words, one that encourages comparative, “cross-regional” analysis. Not surprisingly both Lutz and Warren’s current research projects fit ideally in this setting. Kay Warren’s Story
This fall AAA Board Member Kay Warren came to Brown after five years at Harvard. One of the foremost anthropological Latin Americanists in the US, her research has focused on counterinsurgency wars, community responses to violence, and peace processes; activist intellectuals in social movements; and the anthropology of multi-cultural democracies, leading to publications on indigenous movements and ethnography in unstable places, amongst others. She sees following Kertzer as director of the Watson Institute’s research program on Politics, Culture and Identity as a “unique opportunity” to build international networks and collaborate on overlapping projects addressing violence and conflict, international intervention, major donors, social movements, identity politics, cross-regional issues, social development and the media industry. After 30 years working at the local community level, Warren is now “studying up” to learn how the major donors of foreign aid to Latin America “conjure images” of this region and produce knowledge about it. She is finding that each major donor has its own distinct image of Latin America, state politics, history and involvement with the region. Since 2000, she has been spending a great deal of her time in Japan learning about this country, which is the largest donor of foreign aid to Latin America, followed by the Europeans and then the US. While in Japan—she held a visiting professorship at the University of Tokyo—she has been meeting with local Japanese scholars and elites to understand the culture of foreign aid through a Japanese perspective. Reflecting on her decision to move to Brown, she noted: “I loved Harvard, and planned to stay longer, but this offer was impossible to turn down.” It was “a once in a decade offer” that you take “or lament later.” At the same time, she is pleased to be able to continue her ties with Harvard and her graduate students there, although she becomes equally excited just talking about her undergraduates in a class on media and violence she teaches at Brown. Recently these students recreated both the behind-the-scenes activities in a live newsroom, and an actual broadcasting of a “breaking story.” True to life, in this role-play, the anthropologist commenting on a conflict resulting in US invasion was cut by journalists until a 1 am slot as the newscasters were ambivalent about accounts that challenged their stereotypes of ethnic antagonism. Catherine Lutz’s Story
American Ethnological Society President-elect Catherine Lutz moved to Brown from the University of North Carolina after 11 years there. While part of her decision rests in being part of a dual-career couple, she says she was definitely drawn to the “wonderfully progressive research” occurring at Brown. Here, she observes, “anthropologists are outward facing and connected to current problems, events and solutions.” While in most places, senior anthropologists are making connections on an individual basis to networks of NGOs, it is hard, according to Lutz, “to find connections outside of an institute at some universities.” Further speculating on her move from a public to a private institution, Lutz considers the role of political economy in it. As she said, “state universities are losing support in an increasingly unequal and market-driven atmosphere, so private universities have even more resources to support teaching and research and recruit faculty.” She sees shrinking budgets of public education as an aspect of the more general “hollowing out and privatizing of public goods.” What is needed she says “is an anthropological analysis of how resources shift through educational institutions—not only higher education, but the entire American educational system.” While now at Brown, Lutz is actively forming collaborations with others at the Watson Institute, primarily those interested in global security and culture and identity, on the beginning stages of a study of local reactions to American military bases in the countries of the Pacific Rim. Looking at bases in Guam, South Korea and Okinawa, Japan, Lutz asks why local responses differ in these three situations, each of which has a differing relationship to questions of sovereignty and nation. For instance, in Korea there are particular kinds of objections to US bases differing from and stronger than those in Guam. Social movements have emerged in both Korea and Okinawa that focus especially on revising international agreements that prevent local courts from having jurisdiction over US soldiers who commit crimes while in their countries, but only in Okinawa has there been widespread objection to the presence of the bases themselves. Visionary Leadership at Brown |
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