Rutgers' Cultural Anthropologists Tie Global Processes to Everyday Lives

How do global processes affect the everyday lives of ordinary people? How do the ups and downs of the international financial system affect farmers in Kenya? What does justice mean in Peru or Bolivia, and how does the answer to that question resonate in New Jersey or Maryland? What does it mean to be a citizen when people all over the world are on the move? What are the implications of being different in China, the United States, or Tanzania? How do people with power use it, and how do people without power resist or accommodate themselves to it? These are the questions cultural anthropologists and their students at Rutgers explore in their research.

The cultural anthropology program at Rutgers is built on anthropology's traditional study of peoples, cultures and languages. It is dedicated to cross-cultural understanding and is committed to field work. The Department of Anthropology has created the Program in Critical Interventions in Theory and Ethnography to explore, with other units of the university, the questions of difference, inequality and justice on a global scale, but in local contexts.

Cultural anthropologists study life as people live it. They observe life, but because they are human, they also take part in living it. As Daniel Goldstein says, "This (work) should be 'engaged' ethnography, meaning we're studying people but not just extracting information from them for our own academic purposes. We should be giving something back." Goldstein studies the meaning of law and justice in Bolivia, among poor people who have left their rural homes for greater opportunity in the city. Read more.

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Ulla Berg is also interested in migration, but she is interested in how much of themselves migrants leave behind, and how they maintain their links with their native places. A migrant herself -- she's a native of Denmark -- Berg studies Peruvian immigrants to the United States, and the influence on them of region, class, ethnicity and family. A film maker as well as a teacher and author, Berg has made herself welcome among Peruvians in locales as different as New York City and the Peruvian highlands. Read more.

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Angelique Haugerud has spent nearly three decades conducting field work in Kenya, but the true focus of her work is the meaning of "rich" and "poor" in widely different and rapidly changing societies -- rural Kenya, and the United States. She has followed the lives of hundreds of Kenyans -- including the children and grandchildren of people she first met as a student many years ago -- to understand how they deal with the local effects of globalization, and what they mean when they describe wealth or poverty. Recently, Haugerud has focused on the the meaning of the same concepts iin the United States, where issues of social class have long been difficult to discuss. Read more.

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David Hughes, whose work has been focused on Zimbabwe and Mozambique, studies the relationship between people and the land they live on. In particular, he studies how people from very different cultures -- in this case, African peasants and European immigrants -- view and think about and act on the same land and landscape. He is also interested in how European views of Africa have shaped the the use of the land under colonial and independent governments. Read more.

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Dorothy Hodgson explores the meaning of ethnic and gender identity in a rapidly changing society -- the Maasai in Tanzania. She has concluded after nearly two decades of work among the Maasai that 80 years of well-meaning "development" work has made those issues -- and therefore, the business of everyday life -- more complicated, rather than less. Maasai people, Hodgson shows in her work, are not coffee-table curiosities or icons of "primitive" Africa, but three-dimensional men and women grappling with what it means to be a Maasai man or woman, with what it means to be Maasai in the modern Tanzanian state, and with the daily business of survival in a world where virtually no one is untouched by globalization. Read more.

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Louisa Schein has spent three decades working with an ethnic group called the Miao in China and the Hmong in the United States. Looking at their lives and their cultural strategies in these two complex societies, she focuses on minority gender and ethnic politics by comparing a country where they are mostly peasants with their diasporic country where they are mostly urban refugees. Now writing a book on Hmong media, she is also working on issues of race and cultural representation through her own documentary film production and a close look at the Hmong experience of the film Gran Torino. Read more.

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Other distinguished cultural anthropologists in the Department of Anthropology are:

Laura Ahearn is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist who works on issues of gender, kinship, and marriage in Nepal.

Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi is interested in ethnicity, religion, violence, sacrifice, ritual, media, Hindu nationalism in Gibraltar, the United States and India.

Fran Mascia-Lees, chair of the Department of Anthropology, studies the body and consumer culture, focusing both on the politics of the representation, display, and commodification of bodies marked by "difference" and on contemporary aesthetic consumption focused on the body and its role in the effective accomplishment of everyday life.

Ana Ramos-Zayas studies the politics of citizenship, race, space, and youth culture in U.S. Latino and Latin American migrant communities.  She is the author of National Performances (U of Chicago Press, 2003) and co-author of Latino Crossings (Routledge, 2003). Her current work focuses  the intersection of race and emotion among Brazilian and Puerto Rican youth in Newark, New Jersey, Belo Horizote, Brazil, and Santurce, Puerto Rico.