| John Bowen studies law and politics in Indonesia and Europe. His Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning (Cambridge, 2003) is based on fieldwork in Indonesian courts, and his Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves (Princeton, 2007) concerns current debates in France on Islam and laïcité. |
Jim Wertsch studies how states seek to use collective memory as a means for "people making." This involves the educational system and also the production and interpretation of memorials, national holidays, and other public sites of memory. |
Bret Gustafson studies state transformation, global development, and social movements in Latin America. His New Languages of the State: Indigenous Resurgence and the Politics of Knowledge in Bolivia (Duke, 2008) examined the politics of education reform, race, and neoliberalism in Bolivia. His current project is a study of the global politics of energy and resource nationalism and their relationship with ethnic, territorial, and civil conflict, also focusing on Bolivia. A chapter titled, "Flashpoints of Sovereignty: Natural Gas and Territorial Politics in Bolivia" is forthcoming in The Anthropology of Oil. |
Lois Beck conducts research in the Islamic Republic of Iran on issues concerning tribally organized nomadic pastoralists and ethnic minorities. Her current book is Nomads Move On: The Qashqa'i in Post-Revolutionary Iran (2008). |
Robert Canfield’s “Continuing Issues in the New Central Asia” will appear in 2007 in the volume, Le monde turco-iranien en question: définition, confins, spécificités. Canfield and Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek are editing a book, New Games in Central Asia: Great and Small. |
Geoff Childs is investigating the ways that economic policies in China impact families in rural Tibet. His research focuses on the affect of a changing economic paradigm on inter-generational relations and a family-based care system for the elderly (see recent article in Asian Affairs). |