In Anthropology off the Shelf, leading anthropologists reflect on the craft of writing and the passions that fuel their desire to write books. First of its kind volume in anthropology in which prominent anthropologists and 3 respected professionals outside the discipline follow the tradition of the “writers on writing” genre to reflect on all aspects of the writing process Contributors are high-profile in anthropology and many have a strong presence outside the field, in popular culture Unique in its format: short essays, revealing and straightforward in content and writing style

Notes on Contributors

Lee D. Baker is Dean of Academic Affairs, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences,

Duke University. He is currently completing a book entitled Anthropology

and the Racial Politics of Culture, examining the role anthropology

played in various “culture wars” that were waged throughout the twentieth

century.

Sharon Ball is currently Executive Director of the Broome County Arts

Council in Binghamton, New York. She is the former Senior Cultural Editor

at NPR News in Washington, D.C. In the village of Whitney Point where

she lives, she is an active member of the Community Planning Committee

and the Main Street Development Committee and is working to transform

the small, 100-year-old church that she bought last year into a cultural

center.

Andrew Barnes is the retired editor and CEO of the St. Petersburg Times.

He chaired the Pulitzer Prize Board and the Newspaper Association of

America. He currently chairs the Florida chapter of the Nature Conservancy,

and continues to be a trustee of the Poynter Institute for Media

Studies.

Ruth Behar is an anthropologist, writer, and documentary fi lmmaker. In

her latest book, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, she

recounts her journey back to Cuba and the Jewish communities she discovers

there. Behar’s other books include Translated Woman: Crossing the

Border with Esperanza’s Story and The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology

that Breaks Your Heart. She has also published essays, poetry, and

short fi ction. Behar is Professor of Anthropology at the University of

Michigan and the recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur

Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Karen Brodkin writes about race, gender and activism. She is author of

Making Democracy Matter: Identity and Activism in Los Angeles, and How

Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America. Her

forthcoming book is Power Politics: Environmental Activism in South Los

Angeles. She is Professor Emerita in Anthropology and Women’s Studies at

UCLA.

Micaela di Leonardo is Professor of Anthropology and Performance Studies

at Northwestern University. Her co-edited New Landscapes of Inequality:

Neoliberalism and the Erosion of American Democracy appeared with SAR

Press in 2008. She is currently fi nishing The View from Cavallaro’s, a historical

ethnography of political economy and public culture in New Haven,

Connecticut, for University of California Press. She also has an ongoing

project on black radio, progressive politics, and the American public sphere.

Paul Farmer is Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department

of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Associate Chief of the

Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and

Women’s Hospital, and a co-founder of Partners In Health (PIH), a nonprofi

t organization that provides free health care and undertakes research

and advocacy on behalf of the destitute sick. His current focus is on the

public-sector scale-up of PIH’s model of care in rural Haiti, Rwanda,

Malawi, and Lesotho.

Signithia Fordham, who teaches in the Anthropology Department at the

University of Rochester, takes lived experience as central to her critical

analysis. The author of Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity and

Success at Capital High, she is currently writing a fi ctionalized ethnography,

tentatively titled Downed by Friendly Fire, based on her observations and

interviews regarding aggression between and among socially defi ned Black

and White girls in a suburban high school. Interrogating the gendered performance

of racial scripts, she explicates how subordination and the desire

to belong compel young Black women to learn to breathe with “no air.”

Catherine Kingfi sher is Professor of Anthropology at the University of

Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Her current book project, Traveling Politics,

Traveling Policies: The “New Zealand Experiment” at Home and Abroad,

has two simultaneous foci: fi rst, the travel of neoliberal cultural formations

of gender, personhood, poverty and work from Aotearoa/New Zealand to

Alberta (facilitated by the visit of a former NZ fi nance minister); and

second, the differing experiences of Native and non-Native poor single

mothers in Canada, and Pakeha (white/European), Maori, and Pacifi c Island

poor single mothers in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the context of welfare

state restructuring.

S. Eben Kirksey earned a Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Program,

University of California at Santa Cruz, in early 2008. His writing has

appeared in major newspapers and he has served as a source for journalists

in print and broadcast media. Currently he is completing a book about the

idea of freedom (merdeka) in West Papua that combines multiple genres

and narrative forms: indigenous parable, fi gural realism, the “view from

nowhere,” ethnographic vignettes, oral history, and memoir. A postdoctoral

fellowship in the National Science Foundation’s Science and Society

program (2008–10) will allow him to conduct an ethnographic study of

tropical biology.

Irma McClaurin is Associate Vice President for System Academic Administration

and Executive Director of the fi rst Urban Research and Outreach/

Engagement Center (UROC) at the University of Minnesota. Two children’s

books have been published by Marshall Cavendish. She is working on two

new children’s books, and a longer-term project on Zora Neale Hurston

that examines Zora’s contributions as a scholar/writer, and her continuing

omission from the canon of innovative ethnographic practices. She conducts

writing workshops and continues to write poetry and essays. As Executive

Director of UROC, her goal is to use public and engaged anthropology to

develop programs and infrastructure.

Cheryl B. Mwaria is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University and

Executive Director of the Africa Network, a consortium of liberal arts colleges.

Currently she is working on two research projects – a cross-cultural

comparison of the ethical debates surrounding the use of pre-implantation

genetic diagnosis and a longitudinal ethnographic study of efforts to eliminate

disparities in interconceptional care received by women who have

given birth prematurely. The latter study is being undertaken in conjunction

with the Drexel University College of Medicine and the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Carolyn Nordstrom is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre

Dame. Having struggled for years to fi t the world’s vast roiling multiplex

realities into an academic epistemological universe too small to accommodate

them, she is writing a book challenging the academy to update its

theoretical foundations for the twenty-fi rst century. She conducts fi eldwork

in war zones worldwide and was recently awarded John D. and Catherine

T. MacArthur and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships. Her books include:

Global Outlaws, Shadows of War, and A Different Kind of War Story, plus

several edited volumes.

Roger Sanjek is Professor of Anthropology at Queens College, City University

of New York, where he has taught since 1972. In addition to his Gray Panther experience, he has done fi eldwork in Brazil, Ghana, and Queens,

New York City. His next project will be a collection of essays on ethnography

– past, present, and public.

Arthur K. Spears is Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the City

University of New York Graduate Center. At City College, he is Professor

and Chair in the Anthropology Department and Director of the Black

Studies Program. He is President (2007–9) of the Society for Pidgin and

Creole Linguistics, the largest international body devoted to promoting the

study of contact languages. Professor Spears’s current book projects deal

with Haitian Creole; African American English and Caribbean creole languages;

and introductory linguistics, focusing on increasing diversity within

the discipline.

Maria D. Vesperi is Professor of Anthropology at New College of Florida

and a trustee of the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists. She is currently

completing a book on the relationship between ethnographic narrative

and narrative journalism. By examining where ethnographers and journalists

struggle with similar writing challenges and where their experiences diverge,

she hopes to foster discussion that will help anthropologists work more

effectively with the media and lend new depth to journalists’ understanding

of the ethnographic process. She is also working on a long-term project, a

150-year social history of a utopian community turned company town.

Alisse Waterston is Professor, Department of Anthropology, at the John

Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. She edited

An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline with Berghahn Books

in 2008 and is working on two projects: Out of the Shadows of History

and Memory: Writing My Father’s Life is an intimate ethnography of her

father’s experiences (as a Jewish child in Jedwabne, Poland, a young man

in Havana, and an old man in San Juan, Puerto Rico); Narrating Poland

is an ethnography of Polish-Christian immigrants from northeastern Poland,

now living in New York. Her goal is to write family tales that reveal larger

histories.

Howard Zinn is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Boston University.

He is currently involved in adapting his book A People’s History of

the United States for a television series. It will be called The People Speak,

and there will be four one-hour programs, with each hour concentrating

on a different issue: class, race, women, war. Well-known actors will read

the words of historical fi gures such as Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain,

Emma Goldman, Helen Keller – people who have kept alive the spirit of

dissent and rebellion in this country.