University of Chicago: Department of Anthropology: About the Department

University of Chicago Anthropologists who work in Africa

Faculty
Students:
Preparing for the field
In the field
Writing up
Recent PhDs

Faculty:

Jean Comaroff - Barolong, Botswana/South Africa; South Wales (UK); (history, colonialism and postcolonialism, ritual, medicine, the body, neoliberalism, crime, policing and public order)
John Comaroff - Barolong (Tswana), Botswana/South Africa; (political and legal systems, historical anthropology, colonialism and postcoloniality, modernity and the politics of identity)
Michael Dietler - Southern France; Kenya (Luo); (Archaeology and ethnoarchaeology, colonialism and postcoloniality, political economy, consumption, ritual, material culture, memory, identity politics)
Kesha D. Fikes - Cape Verde Islands, Lusophone Africa, Portugal; (race and the bureaucracies of spatial mobility, the relationship between colonial migrant labor projects and post-colonial/post-independence migrant labor phenomena)
François G. Richard - West Africa, Senegal; Archaeology/African historical experience, landscapes, complexity and political economy, memory, material culture, Marxist and social theory, survey methodology
James Fernandez - Gabon, Dahomey, Togo, Ghana, Natal; Asturias, Spain; Ethnohistorical research in Madrid, Barcelona, Castile, Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfort, Cologne, Paris
Russell Tuttle - Japan, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa (primates, bipedalism)

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Students:

Preparing for the Field

Elizabeth Brummel - Western Kenya (Linguistic Anthropology; [Re]production of ethnolinguistic identity, language ideology, language socialization, ethnicity, identity)
Lauren Coyle - Ghana (Money and banking in postcolonial settings, Marxism, capitalism, neoliberalism, historical ethnography, legal anthropology; desire, repulsion, domination, subjection)
Molly Cunningham - Southern Africa (Urban anthropology, human rights, NGOs and social movements, spatiality and power, citizenship)
Zebulon Dingley - Kenya (Witchcraft/occultism, religion, violence, fetishism, misrecognition, "African Independent Churches")
Claudia Gastrow - Angola, Southern Africa (Portuguese Atlantic empire, Lusophone Africa; colonialism, urban anthropology, space and place, historical anthropology, the archive; "Building History: Heritage and Urban Reconstruction in Luanda")
Debora Heard (A) - Nubia/Egypt, Gebel Barkal, Sudan (State Power: Ideology, religion & material culture; archaeology of ideology: iconography, landscape & ritual; "The intersection of religion and politics in the establishment and maintenance of the Kushite (Napatan/Meroitic) state")
George Paul Meiu - Kenya/East Africa (Anthropology of the body, sexuality and gender, politics of desire and difference, cultural tourism and the commodification of ethnicity; politics of culture among the Samburu of Northern Kenya)
Kharnita Mohamed - South Africa (Anthropology of the senses and the body, visual culture, media, disability; ethnography of the blind)
Michal Ran-Rubin - Senegal/Gambia (Legal anthropology; family, marriage, intimacy in Africa; Islam and the anthropology of religion; liberal political rule in post-colonial states; the civil/family law tradition in post-colonial Africa with focus on divorce disputations and the regulation of polygamy)
Mary Robertson - South Africa (Intersections between music and commercial media; reproduction/transformation of understandings of "race")

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In the Field

Kerry Chance - Durban, South Africa; "Living Politics: Practices and Protests of the 'Poor' in Democratic South Africa"
Bernard Dubbeld (Jt. w/History) - Durban (Umlazi) & Nongoma, South Africa; "Building a Respectable Home: The Problem of Dwelling in the KwaZulu-Natal Hinterland"
Hannig, Anita - Ethiopia - "Repair and Return? - The Reintegration of Cured Fistula Patients into Their Communities in Rural Ethiopia"
Kathryn McHarry - Senegal, "Growing the Nation: Childhood, Medicine, and Technology in Senegal's Development"
Mark Geraghty - Kigali, Rwanda; An ethnographic investigation of Genocide Ideology in Rwanda
Erik Lee Skjon (Jt.Ling.) - Pemba & Mecúfi Districts (Shankan Makhuwa dialect area), Cabo Delgado Province, N. Mozambique (morpho-syntax, ethno-regiionalism, areal linguistics, value circuits); "The Regional Dynamics of Ethnolinguistic Identity in Mozambique: Its Figures and Grounds in Three Makhuwa Networks"
Joshua Walker - Mbuji Mayi, DR Congo; The creation of habitable sociocultural worlds in a context of long-term economic and political crisis: street childrean and youth in Mbuji Mayi

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Writing Up

Maureen Anderson - Abidjan & Agni Region of M'batto, Cote d'Ivoire; "Imagined Democracies and Nocturnal Communities: The State of Civil Society in Cote d'Ivoire"
Robert Blunt - Kenya; "Fake Mau Maus and Ambiguous States: Oathing, Criminality and History in Contemporary Kenya" (about the Kikuyu ritual practice known as "oathing" and the minting of money)
Betsey Brada - Gaborone, Botswana; "Uncertain Futures, Experimental Lives: The Politics of Knowledge in Botswana's AIDS Epidemic"
Filipe Calvão - Calonda-Lucapa, Angola; "The Rough and the Cut: Law, Value, and Fetish in a Postcolonial Diamond Enclave"
Jeremy Jones - Harare, Zimbabwe; " 'This is Not Money': Cash, Hustling and Ethics Amongst Township Youth in Hyperinfationary Zimbabwe"
Azande Mangeango - Sudan, global Zande diaspora; "Performing the Nation (Sudan); CyberSpace, Commemoration, and the Social Production of Trans/National Identities"
Kathleen Lorne McDougall - Cape Town and Orania, South Africa; "Isolated Population?: Afrikaners in Post-Apartheid South Afirca"
Gretchen Pfeil (Jt.Ling) - Dakar, Senegal; "Small Change, Big Changes: Religious Commitments and the High Stakes of Small Charitable Gifts in Dakar, Senegal"

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Recent PhDs

Mark Auslander - Chipata District, Eastern Province, Zambia; “Fertilizer has Brought Poison: Crises of Reproduction in Ngoni Society and History”
Misty Bastian - Onitsha, Southeastern Nigeria; “The World as Marketplace: Historical, Cosmological and Popular Constructions of the Onitsha [Nigeria] Market System”
William Bissell - Old Stone Town, Zanzibar, Tanzania; “‘City of Stone, Space of Contestation’: Urban Conservation and the Colonial Past in Zanzibar”
Kathleen Blue (P) - Maboko, Lake Victoria, Western Kenya (Miocene); “Functional Morphology of the Forelimb in Victoriapithecus and Its Implication for Phylogeny within the Catarrhini”
Vicki Brennan - Lagos, Nigeria; " ‘Singing the Same Song': Music, Morality and Movement in Yoruba Churches"
Beth Anne Buggenhagen - Dakar, Senegal; “At Home in the Black Atlantic: Circulation, Domesticity and Value in the Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora”
Melinda Carter (P) - Kibale Forest National Park, Toro Province, Western Uganda; “Sensitivity of Stable Isotopes in Bone to Dietary Specialization and Niche Separation between Sympatric Primates in Kibale Forest National Park, Uganda
Deborah Durham - Mahalapye, Botswana, Southern Africa; “Images of Culture: Being Herero and the Reconstruction of Cultural Identities in Liberal Democracy”
Elizabeth Garland - Mweka, Tanzania; "State of Nature: Colonial Power, Neoliberal Capital, and Wildlife Management in Tanzania"
Kelly Gillespie - Cape Town, South Africa; "Criminal Abstractions and the Post-Apartheid Prison"
David Graeber - Vikinisisaony, Southern Imerina, Central Madagascar; “The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987: Memory and Violence in Rural Madagascar”
Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers - Central African Republic (Zande); “A History and Ethnography of Modernity Among the Zande, Central African Republic”
Shannon Jackson - Univ. of the Western Cape, Bellville, Cape Town, South Africa; “The South African Public Sphere and the Politics of Coloured Identity”
Mikael Karlstrom - Kampala, Entebbe & Lkuwero Area, Uganda; “The Cultural Kingdom in Uganda : Popular Royalism and the Restoration of the Buganda Kingship”
Anne-Maria Makhulu - Cape Town, South Africa; “Dismantling Homes, Dismantling Apartheid: The Politics and Practice of Squatting in Cape Town”
Douglas Mirsky (P) - Comparative Primate Morphology; “Functional Morphology of Vertebral Foramina: A comparison of Fossil Hominids to Homo sapiens, Pan troglodytes and Papio SP with particular attention to KNM WT 1500”
Charles Musiba (P) - Serengeti Region, Tanzania (Laetoli); “Laetoli Pliocene Paleoecology: A Reanalysis via Morphological and Behavioral Approaches”
Zolani Ngwani - Univ of Fort Hare, Alice, KwaZulu-Natal?, South Africa; “The Politics of Campus and Community in South Africa: A Historical Ethnography of the University of Fort Hare”
Rebecca Popenoe - Egawan, Niger; “‘Girls’ Work is Stomach Work’: Female Fatness, Sexuality, and Society Among the Azawagh Arabs (Moors) of Niger”
Michael Ralph - Dakar, Senegal; "(At)Play in the Postcolony"
Johanna Schoss - Malindi, Kenya; “Beach Tours and Safari Visions: Relations of Production and the Production of ‘Culture’ in Malindi, Kenya”
Jesse Shipley - Legon, Ghana; “National Audiences and Consuming Subjects: A Political Genealogy of Performance in Neo-Liberal Ghana”
James Smith - Taita Hills Region, Kenya; “Bewitching Development: The Moral Economy of Development and Anti-Development in Taita Kenya”
Debra Spitulnik (Jt. Ling) - Kitwe & Lusaka + Bemba area (Northern Province), Zambia; “Radio Culture in Zambia : Audiences, Public Words, and the Nation State”
Jennifer Spruill - Cape Town, South Africa; "When the Rainbow is Not Enough: Sexual Citizenship in Post-Apartheid South Africa"
Amy Stambach - Masama District, Kilamanjaro Region, Tanzania (+ Dar es Salaam); “Knowledge is Wealth: The Culture of Schooling Among the Chagga of Northern Tanzania”
Hylton White - Melmoth, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (Entembeni area, northern Zululand); “Domesticity and the Politics of Customary Rule in Post-Apartheid Zululand”
Erik Wimbley-Brodnax - Dakar, Senegal; "Psychiatry and the Penc: Cosmopolitanism, 'Medicoscapes', and Faith at Clinique Moussa Diop, Dakar, Senegal"

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