Anthropology Faculty
Robert R. Desjarlais
Courses: The Anthropology of Bodies, Ethnographic Research and Writing
B.A., University of Massachusetts-Amherst. M.A., Ph.D., University of California-Los Angeles. Special interests in the cultural construction of experience and subjectivity, the political economy of illness and healing, and language and power in complex societies; ethnographic fieldwork in the Nepal Hima-layas and with the residents of a homeless shelter in Boston; author of Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas; Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless; and Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths Among Nepal’s Yolmo Buddhists. Recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Howard fellowship. NIMH postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School. SLC, 1994-
Luther Elliott
B.A., University of Connecticut. M.A., Ph.D., New York University. Conducted multisited ethnographic research into alternative communities of practice oriented around the Goa trance musical genre and an illicit pharmacopoeia associated with the hippie movements of the 1960’s to 1970’s; dissertation focuses on technologies of social reproduction and the generative place of ephemerality in many emergent cultural and community forms; current areas of interest and investigation include expressive and material culture, the anthropology of sound, the acquisition of cultural practices, the New Age, computer mediated communities, and the anthropology of consciousness. SLC, 2006-
Christopher Garces
Courses: What Is Religion? Anthropological Perspectives, Explosive Latin America: Guns, Terror, and Everyday Violence, Stateless Peoples in Latin America
B.A., University of California-Santa Barbara. M.A., George Washington University. Ph.D. candidate, Princeton University. Special interests include Latin American politics, history, and culture; urban ethnography; social abandonment; contemporary Catholicism; and the performative aspects of Catholic conservatism. Carried out more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador; dissertation, “Whither Charity? Conservative Body Politics in Post-Independence Ecuador,” charts the transformations of Catholic charity as a modern political instrument over the past century, with a particular focus on Church-based clinical services and labor education for the working-class poor; recipient of the President’s fellowship at Princeton University and a dissertation writing fellowship with the Center for the Study of Religion. SLC, 2006-
Maria Elena Garcia
on leave 2006-07
B.A., College of William and Mary. Ph.D., Brown University. Special interests include indigenous politics, race and ethnicity, development, education and language policy, and the cultural politics of globalization; ethnographic fieldwork in highland Peru, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and with Latin American immigrants in the U.S.; author of several publications on the politics of ethnography, community, development, and education in the Andes; her book, Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Education, and Multicultural Development in Peru, is a multisited ethnographic exploration of the local and transnational articulations of indigenous movements, multicultural development policies, and indigenous citizenship in Peru; fellowships include a Fulbright Dissertation Research fellowship, a Dissertation Writing fellowship from the Watson Institute for International Studies, and a Mellon Postdoctoral fellowship at Wesleyan University. SLC, 2002-
Kathleen Kilroy-Marac
Courses: Representing Africa, Spectral Engagements: The Anthropology of Time, Memory, and History
B.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison. M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. candidate, Columbia University. Special interests include sub-Saharan African history, culture, and politics; colonialism and postcoloniality; issues of representation and the production of knowledge; experimental ethnography; commodities and the anthropology of consumption; spirit possession, witchcraft, and spectrality; reckonings of time and the politics of memory. Carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Dakar, Senegal; dissertation, “The Impossible Inheritance: Time, Memory, and Postcolonial Subjectivity at the Fann Psychiatric Hospital in Dakar, Senegal,” considers how the recent history of a well-known psychiatric hospital in Dakar has come to be recounted through personal narratives that also reflect discourses of national hope and hopelessness of the past, in the present, and for the future. Fellowships include the Fulbright-Hays (DDRA) Award and a Columbia University Travel Grant for dissertation research. SLC, 2007-
Mary A. Porter
Associate Dean of the College
B.A., Manchester University. M.A., Ph.D., University of Washington. Special interests include gender, class, race, sexuality, colonialism, education, oral history, and sub-Saharan Africa; ethnographic fieldwork with Swahili people in coastal Kenya; co-author of Winds of Change: Women in Northwest Commercial Fishing and author of several articles on gender and education; grants include Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research fellowship and Spencer fellowship; consultant, UNESCO. SLC, 1992-