About

Ira Bashkow is an Associate Professor and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Anthropology at the University of Virginia. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1999. His specialties include social and cultural theory, corporate organizations, financial markets, globalization, development, race studies, ethnographic research methods, the history of anthropology, and Oceania. Bashkow is currently writing a book titled The Corporate Form, which offers a humanistic conception of the corporation, emphasizing its cultural origins and significance beyond economic and legal frameworks. His ethnographic research has been conducted in Papua New Guinea, focusing on the Orokaiva and Arapesh communities, exploring themes such as race, development, and cultural perceptions. Bashkow has also engaged in research on the history of anthropology, analyzing how past anthropologists were perceived and how their work was influenced by colonial contexts. His teaching includes courses on the concept of culture, globalization, the anthropology of corporations, ethnographic methods, and ethnographic writing. His work contributes to understanding the cultural underpinnings of social institutions and the diversity of human lifestyles.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Humanities
• Anthropology
• Law
• History
• Social Science
• Media studies
• Art
• Gender studies
• Ethnology

Selected publications

• Roy Wagner (1938–2018)

  American Anthropologist · 2023-05-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Roy Wagner at University of Virginia in 2009. (Photograph by Johannes Neurath) Roy Wagner, a visionary theorist of cultural meaning and creativity, died on September 10, 2018, at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was known for his work on kinship, ritual, and myth in Papua New Guinea and for his experiments in representing anthropological thought as a “reciprocity of perspectives” that helped to inspire the “ontological turn” as well as reverse, symmetrical, and cross anthropologies. Born on October 2, 1938, Wagner grew up in a Central European immigrant community on Cleveland's west side. His parents were both the children of German-speaking immigrants from Metzenseifen (now Medzev), near Slovakia's border with Hungary. His father, Richard Robert Wagner, was a hardworking organization man who became Cleveland's chief of police. His socially reserved mother, Florence Helen (Mueller) Wagner, who raised Roy and his younger sister, Nancy Elliott, was a widely read intellectual humanist. It was Florence who introduced Wagner to anthropology when he was a teenager through books written by Alfred Kroeber. An avid science fiction fan coming of age after World War II, Wagner was fascinated by atomic scientists like Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and he aspired to be an astrophysicist. But when he arrived at Harvard with a scholarship, he soon changed his major to medieval history (Macfarlane, 2011). Reading Oswald Spengler (1927, 21), he became engrossed by Spengler's critique of Eurocentrism and by the cultural pluralism of his sweeping vision of history in which “there is not one [art and] one physics, but many,” each culture having its own unique “possibilities of self-expression.” In 1961, Wagner started graduate study in anthropology at the University of Chicago, where his mentor was the kinship maven David Schneider. The two became very close, speaking and corresponding frequently until Schneider's death in 1995. Wagner's dissertation fieldsite was determined by a grant he received from the New Guinea Native Religions Project organized by James Watson and Kenneth Read at the University of Washington. They sent Wagner, a 25-year-old who had never traveled outside the United States, to a particularly isolated part of the New Guinea Highlands along the Papua-New Guinea frontier. Mt. Karimui is a towering, dormant volcano girdled by a high-altitude plateau that is lushly rainforested and cut by deep gorges. Cool, wet, and cloudy, this tropical forest was the home of 3,000 Daribi people who lived in two-story, barrel-roofed longhouses surrounded by their large swidden food gardens (Wagner, 1967, 9). In this area that was accessible to foreigners only by small plane and lengthy treks, the people had been subject to de facto colonial rule for only two or three years (Wagner, 1979). Here, Wagner would study kinship, social structure, and religion in the Daribi village of Kurube. He was befriended by Kagoiano Bapo, who became his host, “informant, analyst, companion, and confidant” (Wagner, 1967, x; 2012, S161). Living at Kurube from late 1963 into 1965, Wagner learned the language and forged relationships with Kagoiano's clan relatives. One of these was the knowledge-keeper Yapenugiai, who became Wagner's field mentor. An experienced orator, dream interpreter, healer, hunter, and spirit medium who delighted in the fine points of lore and ritual, Yapenugiai, Wagner liked to say, was the master to whom he apprenticed (Wagner, 1972, xii; 1978, 12; 2012, S163). While Wagner was in the field, Schneider sent him the manuscript of his 1963 lecture “Some Muddles in the Models,” which criticized structural-functionalist descent theory, then the dominant theory of kinship, for “imposing our way of thinking on their systems” of thought (Schneider, 1965, 28–29; see also Bashkow, 1991, 230). In his field home at Mt. Karimui, Wagner carefully read this lengthy essay 11 times over (he said he counted them), and he took it as a model for his doctoral thesis, which described Daribi kinship and social structure in terms of Daribi cultural concepts. This was an innovation inasmuch as earlier anthropologists who had studied New Guinea Highlands societies had described them as having lineage-based clans and subclans, using models derived from British social anthropological research in Africa (Barnes, 1962). Moreover, the Daribi concepts formed an Indigenous kinship theory that Wagner (1967, 1977) put on par with the theories of anthropologists, arguing that it was similar to (and, indeed, an inversion of) the “alliance theory” of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Upon receiving his PhD in 1966, Wagner was hired as assistant professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University, where he met Brenda Sue Geilhausen, the department secretary. They married in June 1968 and left the next month for a year at Mt. Karimui. Wagner's dissertation had just been published as a book, The Curse of Souw (Wagner, 1967), featuring a glowing foreword by Schneider and Wagner's own drawings and poetry. When the couple returned from New Guinea, Wagner began a new job at Northwestern University, where their daughter, Erika, and son, Jonathan, were born. (Sue and Wagner divorced in 1994.) But at Northwestern, Wagner clashed with Paul Bohannan and was, as he described it, “thrown out.” In 1974, he was hired as the first chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, where a joint department with sociology was splitting.1 Wagner would chair the Virginia department from 1974–1979 and 1982–1986 and teach there for the next 44 years, until he died. In the 1970s, Wagner became fascinated by the substitution of paired elements that is a pervasive device in New Guinea rhetoric and ritual. When a speaker brings together two elements, like a man and a sago palm, in a figure of speech, the juxtaposition can reveal characteristics of each that are otherwise unapparent (Rumsey, 2002, 4). One element can alternately stand for and hide the other, and one can be used to magically influence the other by symbolically manipulating their differences and similarities. This analogical mode of creativity, Wagner observed, is the same as that at work in familiar figures of speech like metaphor and metonymy, and in all symbolism that works by a relationship of resemblance between a signifier and a signified. In his 1972 monograph, Habu: The Innovation of Meaning in Daribi Religion, Wagner used this model to explain the creativity of Daribi origin myths, rain magic, naming practices, dream interpretation, poetry of lament, and mourning rituals. He then turned the analogical model on anthropology itself, using it to describe how anthropologists experience and construct “cultures,” both their own and others, in tandem. Schneider was editing a book series at the textbook publisher Prentice-Hall, and he urged Wagner to write an anthropology textbook. The result was The Invention of Culture, where Wagner introduces anthropology not as the study of preexisting “cultures” but as a process in which anthropologists personally experience two different ways of living and interpret them analogically. Reasoning from the archetypal scenario of a solitary ethnographer immersed in an unfamiliar society, Wagner explains that the juxtaposition between the fieldworker's own ingrained expectations from home and the new situation they are dealing with in the field leads them to experience the field situation as a “culture” that is both similar to and different from their culture at home. In this way they “invent” both cultures as “equivalent entities” that are analogically linked: the concept of culture “draws an invisible equal sign” between the two realms (Wagner, 1975, 3, 4). Arising as it does from the fieldworker's experience, no understanding of culture can be absolutely objective. But in continually reworking and refining it, criticizing and improving it recursively in light of their deepening experience in the field, conscientious fieldworkers will themselves be affected by the analogy between their home and their field culture: they may come to “realize new. . . possibilities for the living of life, and may in fact undergo a personality change” (4). For their part, the people studied will be reciprocally studying the fieldworker, and constructing their own analogies, thereby inventing the fieldworker's culture as the fieldworker invents theirs. They will be doing “reverse anthropology” (11, 31). Building on his teacher Schneider's (1968) critique of the Euro-American assumption that “blood” kinship is natural, Wagner (1975, 46, 49, 141–42, 149; 1978, 21–23) argued that people everywhere treat some symbols (like blood) as unalterable givens of reality, while accepting that others are social creations for which humans are responsible. But as the ethnographic record shows, what counts as “given,” as opposed to created, varies greatly across cultures, proving that the perception of what is unalterable is itself constructed by culture, usually supporting the status quo. Analyzing paired elements is also the key to explicating myths by a technique Wagner propounded in his 1978 book Lethal Speech: Daribi Myth as Symbolic Obviation and that he taught for many years in his University of Virginia graduate course Mythodology. Similar to the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss then in vogue, Wagner's “discovery procedure,” as he termed it, starts with analysis of the transformations that form a myth's plot (Wagner 1978, 13). A plot may be thought of as a succession of situations that supplant one another in turn. For this to make sense, any adjacent pair of situations must be meaningfully substitutable. (For example, when an eagle flies off with an infant and nurtures it, it is substituting for, i.e., analogous to, the infant's parents.) In Wagner's idiom, the one state of affairs is obviated by the analogous successor state. In Lethal Speech, Wagner used this technique to explicate Daribi origin stories that Yapenugiai had narrated (11–15). Wagner found that, in addition to situations themselves, the two successive transformations between three situations were also often analogous, and that a good story tends to circle back to its beginning so that the initial and end states may be analogous, too. He diagrammed such “obviation sequences” by triangles within triangles. He created many such analyses throughout his subsequent work, analyzing all manner of processual sequences (see, e.g., Wagner, 1986b). Wagner also studied Papuan “wandering hero” tales in which a mythic hero journeys across the lands of one group and then another, creating prominent features of the landscape by his activities. Each group owns only that part of the hero's story that took place on their land, so storytellers say things like, “to find out what happened next, ask the people who own that land over there where the hero went after he left our area.” Such stories are similar to Indigenous Australian “Dreamings,” and they are found across a wide swathe of southern New Guinea, to the south and west of Karimui. Wagner (1972, 20; 1996) pieced together such hero journeys across 400 miles. Roy Wagner at his field home in Kurube, Papua New Guinea, in 1964. Roy Wagner at Mt. Karimui, Papua New Guinea. But one of Wagner's most profound contributions may be his questioning of the basic social scientific concept of the “social group.” In The Curse of Souw, Wagner showed that Daribi do not just have culturally distinctive concepts of social units, but they apply them in unexpected ways. They will say that two individuals descend from a common ancestor and so share “blood,” using an apparently English-like idiom that standard theory expects, but they do not then use this commonality to define them as members of a single descent-based clan group, since, as Daribi see it, everyone shares a tie of common descent to everyone else. Instead, they define clan membership by who participates in exchanges of meat and wealth. Individuals who exchange together as a clan group become the clan, differentiating themselves as a unit from the others to whom they give and receive. As a result, a clan's membership is “constantly changing”: dividing, amalgamating, dispersing, and regrouping (Wagner, 1967, 182). Taking this argument further in his now-classic book chapter “Are There Social Groups in the New Guinea Highlands?” Wagner answered “no.” True, Daribi people have names for groups and sometimes talk as if these are descent groups. But the membership is not determined by descent, nor does descent truly determine who an individual may or may not marry. Rather, it is the reverse: when marriage and acts of exchange take place, they “elicit” a group's membership (Wagner, 1974, 107–11). Groups are entailed and improvisatory, generated out of each person's historically informed but ultimately creative political choices and activities. Anthropologists, Wagner suggested, have tended to project their own preconceptions about social groups onto other societies. In this way, they have been like the colonial administrative officers who tried to “straighten things out” by having Daribi build new settlements that consolidated them “into clear-cut, Western-style groups”—only to find that these foreign-impelled units quickly disintegrated (114, 119). In summer 1979, Wagner brought his children Erika and Jonathan to a second Papua New Guinea fieldsite, Bakan village, on the north-central coast of New Ireland, where he did fieldwork for nine months and later another summer among the Barok. In a resulting monograph, Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image, and Social Power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland (Wagner, 1986a), he further developed his ideas of paired elements, obviation, and social structure as elicited by creative action. Barok leaders generate social power by “eliciting” collectivities. They craft and decompose artful images that encompass, bound, or “contain” collectivities and their power, and they increase their own personal power by rhetorical performances, deceptions, and ritualized tricks that induce in others an experience of awesome revelation by a shift of perspective and figure-ground reversal. In identifying elicitation, containment, and revelation as basic modes of socially creative activity, Wagner helped inspire the “New Melanesian Ethnography,” a movement emphasizing that Indigenous cultural forms involve creativity and innovation (see Scott, 2007). In the late 1970s, he also began a long, productive intellectual exchange with Marilyn Strathern, who similarly constructed dialogs between Indigenous and anthropological theories (in particular with regard to gender), comparing their respective presumptions about what is “given” in nature as opposed to created (Strathern, 1980, 1988; McKinnon, 2017, 160–64). In fall 1986, Wagner spent a as a at the University of the next years, Wagner about Daribi and Barok figures of speech and creativity, but he from these to them and the they reveal by analogy about anthropological the nature of reality, and the This was, of a he had started in earlier works like The Invention of Culture, but he took it into realms of and In Wagner developed a lecture course for the next about the of which an with a in the United and The fact that Wagner had apprenticed with a Yapenugiai, in New Guinea took on new meaning in light of this his and others, Wagner in and read their He began two about science the of and the language and he the and in the of he in his own books and Wagner, He became an intellectual rhetorical of perspective between and science to between and reality, and scholarship, spirit and and nature and He also rhetorical he had learned in Papua New Guinea. and other Papua New are at speaking their both up and to accessible only to In the Daribi this form of power is speech of and described as that back itself as it is Wagner used this rhetorical device in of his He an back on itself, a one such as and then and it like the in a Wagner's to Papua New Guinea was in summer by his PhD he returned to Karimui, at Kurube just after his Daribi Yapenugiai, had one after the Wagner and a outside his It was a the in Daribi myth to but also to the of and (Wagner, 1967, to his to take Wagner and that he was by a who on with its light into the back of (Wagner, Daribi people the dream as a from other indeed, like the hero of the Yapenugiai had become a with the to the living This meaning of the was the for his In Wagner for a month in where The Invention of had just been published in In de and Wagner met and who found in his that anthropology and Indigenous be a “reciprocity of perspectives” among He many times that this was a of his In his Wagner taught of anthropologists, Brenda and He his on the model of Schneider's for and he was as a rule a of work by other manuscript and who Wagner his and the of on an coming from A with Roy through medieval Barok physics, theory, landscape and and with Roy take up a large part of He had of thought and was by He if not this also be and In Karimui in Wagner that people from the where land was and the was were Daribi their and using and to Daribi One such who a and to be an was by the people of a Daribi village, no land greatly the that he He that their land had to his own the of and and to it they must work for him (Wagner, Wagner to the Australian colonial which a to Karimui and the to Wagner was to that some were themselves people to at Karimui, where the was a were to build a across the landscape to the that and were in for Daribi Wagner the He published an in the of the Australian on New Guinea that he not to Karimui but to (Wagner, He the colonial that the was that it would do the good for the and that the would Daribi people 31). Wagner argued that it would the same as of of Indigenous people in the and Wagner also an Australian about the and the the Australian of Papua New Guinea, with him to Karimui to the of a New Guinea was in The and were Karimui is by no one is having in only in Wagner's death Wagner's work is widely read outside the United (see, e.g., and with the of the and 2017, it is in the of anthropology de and by the Indigenous anthropology research and of the de at the University of in the of the Wagner's ideas are also into the work of other Indigenous anthropologists, such as the Papua New and In these and other like his Daribi Wagner to to the His are in in the of who to them to the University of in In addition to published have on our of with and about his intellectual in graduate on the anthropology of Papua New Guinea on September each have many of and Roy created and with over the have from with his and McKinnon, David and the as well as Richard Marilyn Strathern, and Wagner for to Jonathan Wagner, Erika Wagner, and the late Brenda Sue

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• There's more to anthropology's past than most of us know

  American Anthropologist · 2023 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Anthropology
  • History

  Akhil Gupta and Jessie Stoolman's “Decolonizing US Anthropology” is motivated by the painful observation that the world is a hot mess of racism, genocide, dispossession, neoimperialism, inequality, and environmental destruction. And what has anthropology done about it? Precious little, to judge by the results. In asking what the field would have been like if it had confronted the world's problems fittingly, the clear implication Gupta and Stoolman make is that past anthropologists did not do enough (or did not do the right things) to solve burning problems of the here and now in their research, writing, teaching, and activism. But many past anthropologists did work passionately to solve pressing problems, and we should avoid perpetuating their erasure from the discipline's historical memory. In the 1930s, for example, Allison Davis, a Black social anthropologist protégé of W. Lloyd Warner, led a multiracial team studying Jim Crow racism and social class in Natchez, Mississippi. To recruit a young St. Clair Drake to the project, Davis told him: “You can't really smash the system if you don't understand how it works” (Baber 1999, 198). The resulting ethnography, Deep South (Davis, Gardner, and Gardner [1941] 2022), was based on methodologically innovative interracial participant observation. It portrayed the town's Black elite as well as rural Black sharecroppers, and it showed how whites’ economic gain drove anti-Black violence. Davis was the first Black scholar to earn tenure at the University of Chicago and came to occupy a distinguished endowed chair in the Department of Education. His work has faded, wrongly, from most anthropologists’ memory (Varel 2018). Another little-known example is Amelia Susman Schultz, Franz Boas's last PhD student, a white Jewish Brooklynite. Corroborating Native women's accounts with archival research in federal records, Schultz's dissertation was a searing critique of the US government Indian agents, missionaries, and ranchers who committed land theft, enslavement, rape, and massacres of Native people in Round Valley, California, during and after the Gold Rush (Susman 1976). She was pressed to withdraw the dissertation, however, and it remained unpublished for decades because of the settler-colonial complicity of Ralph Linton, Boas's successor at Columbia.1 To gain her PhD, Schultz had to write a second dissertation, on a linguistics topic with Boas's encouragement, and she later worked with the Tsimshian intellectual and high chief William Beynon (Miller 2022). While Boas and other anthropologists regularly hired Beynon to do ethnographic research for works they published in their own names (Anderson and Halpin 2000; Halpern 1978; Menzies 2021), Schultz helped him prepare an article he wrote and facilitated its publication in American Anthropologist without her own name appearing in it at all (Beynon 1941). Schultz then had a career in social work and genetic counseling, where she contributed anthropological perspectives and methods (Miller 2022). Her example, like Davis's, shows that the kind of anthropology many today assume to have been untried in past eras in fact was tried, but it has been suppressed or has remained in obscurity. Yet another example is the mid-twentieth-century movement called action anthropology, started by Sol Tax. Action anthropologists devoted their research, grant writing, and organizational effort to supporting initiatives directed by Indigenous communities, mostly in the United States. Some did community-driven collaborative research; others put their skills and personal energies at the disposal of Indigenous leaders to directly aid political change-making work (see, e.g., Arndt 2019; Smith 2021). Action anthropologists sought on principle to stay out of the spotlight. Their work was often discounted by more prominent anthropologists, and so has been largely forgotten. Their interventions are important for the discipline to recall and reclaim, as they can serve as a model for us in the present. Action anthropologists were productively associated with the development of the field of Native American, Indian, and Indigenous studies (Hancock, in prep). Fortunately, their stories are currently being told by historians of anthropology Joshua Smith, Robert Hancock, and Grant Arndt. In the late 1940s, anthropologists came into the sights of the anticommunist crusades known as McCarthyism. The AAA formed a committee to protect the individuals targeted by the McCarthyist witch hunts, but it was quickly undermined by the ultraconservative anthropologist George Peter Murdock, who got himself appointed as chair.2 Murdock denounced his own colleagues in a letter he wrote to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Thanks to David Price's (2004) historical research, we now know the identities of ten of the twelve anthropologists Murdock betrayed: Irving Goldman, Jules Henry, Melville Jacobs, Alexander Lesser, Oscar Lewis, Richard Morgan, John Murra, Morris Siegel, Morris Swadesh, and Gene Weltfish. All but one was Jewish, and all were involved in antiracist activism, either by public writing, speaking, and broadcasting or by political advocacy and direct service (e.g., Gene Weltfish wrote an antiracist pamphlet with Ruth Benedict that was mass distributed and adapted in a union-produced short film; Richard Morgan, an archaeologist, was an NAACP member and active campaigner against race-restrictive real estate covenants in Columbus, Ohio). The McCarthyists and FBI also persecuted Black scholars, including W. E. B. Du Bois and St. Clair Drake, along with many other white anthropologists, such as Robert Armstrong, Cora Du Bois, Kathleen Gough, Jack Harris, Ruth Landes, Ashley Montagu, Philleo Nash, Marvin Opler, Paul Radin, Jerome Rauch, Earle Reynolds, Vera Rubin, Bernhard Stern, and George Stocking. Many lost their jobs and left anthropology. Many suffered distress, humiliation, and often financial ruin. Armstrong and Swadesh emigrated from the United States. Their examples spread fear, leading other anthropologists to censor themselves and steer clear of activism. This is undoubtedly part of why antiracist causes were largely “silenced” in US anthropology for years to come (Price 2004, 64, 71–75, 79, 110ff., 344–45; 2019, 15; see also Maxwell 2015; Stocking 2006, 129–31, 158–82).3 Remembering this can help us grasp the importance of preparing now to protect our fellow anthropologists, this time skillfully, from the neo-McCarthyist attacks being launched today against antiracist initiatives and teachers in US schools, universities, and companies. When we teach foundational courses about anthropology's past, there is no need for hagiography. A syllabus should never be confused with a gallery of saints. Indeed, our students should know about and learn from predecessors’ shortcomings as well as their contributions. I am a white Jewish man, but when I teach about Franz Boas, I draw out his faults, like the failings of his liberal assimilationist solutions to racism (so familiar from my own upbringing) that solidify racism in ways he did not see—but that future generations must recognize.4 I also communicate my deep admiration for his accomplishments, intellectual astuteness and bravery, and mentoring of unprecedently diverse and unconventional students (Bashkow 2020). Much of this is not well conveyed by the stale selections of his writings found in standard anthologies; I update these by including more of Boas's public writings attacking white supremacy and imperialist nationalism, writings that are, sadly, pertinent today. As an intellectual ancestor, Boas is worthy of every anthropology student's attention. It is worth noting that it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that he came to be generally considered a founding figure, thanks in part to the work of my late teacher George Stocking.5 I will close by reporting on one of my own efforts to respond to a question that Gupta and Stoolman raise about how decolonizing anthropology can avoid “ending up re-centering the United States.” I recently began teaching undergraduates about US racism in global comparative perspective. Though the specificities of racism in the United States are striking, they stand out against a background of commonalities with the forms of racism experienced by Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, religious and ethnic minorities, and others in societies in many parts of the world. Many of these commonalities stem from shared settler-colonial dynamics, imperialism, or other historical relationships. This comparative inquiry opens a space of learning-across-places that balances students’ experience and knowledge of the United States with centering others. It also shows students the power of comparison, an anthropological staple. Building on my own research on racism and the construction of race in Papua New Guinea (Bashkow 2006), the course lets me examine other present-day and historical examples of racism in the Pacific, Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America and to compare anti-Black and anti-Jewish racism, which are tightly linked in white supremacy (Loeffler 2022). It has allowed me to make anthropology relevant to the experience of many students of color and provided them with positive models for change. It is one way I have tried to contribute to decolonizing anthropology. Others will have their own ways that I could not begin to imagine. There is no end to the ways anthropologists can work to repair the world, each according to our gifts, and I maintain hope that our efforts will lessen the problems and leave a better world to our successors. But the opposing forces are no joke. They are well-resourced, and they are not content to sit still. I will not be surprised if things become worse, and maybe much worse, before they get better. In that case, anthropologists of the future will still be asking why their predecessors failed to repair the world, with all its urgent, evident, murderous problems. I am grateful to Grant Arndt, Nicholas Barron, Tracie Canada, Elizabeth Chin, Lise Dobrin, Tessa Farmer, Robert Hancock, Richard Handler, James Igoe, Rena Lederman, Herb Lewis, Sean Mallin, Peter Metcalf, Jay Miller, David Price, and Joshua Smith for reading drafts of this comment.

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• The Cultural and Historical Openness of Bernard Narokobi’s ‘Melanesian Way’

  Journal of Pacific History · 2020 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Social Science

  Narokobi’s call for a distinctive ‘Melanesian Way’ was not rigid traditionalism. Narokobi understood Melanesian indigeneity as agentively engaging the foreign, seeking and welcoming it, as opposed to merely acquiescing to it as an unbidden, external force. This understanding was informed by Narokobi’s Arapesh cultural background and his experience of a historic movement led by the visionary Arapesh leader Sir Pita Simogun in the 1950s to modernize the distinctive cultural institution of the Arapesh ‘roads’, which were practical travel passageways as well as valued channels of exchange and social relationships. The modernized Arapesh road facilitated Narokobi’s passage to advanced education just as new scholarships and opportunities were created by Australia’s acceleration of decolonization, positioning him to study law in Sydney and play a central role in planning for PNG’s constitution. It was also a potent Indigenous model that Narokobi built upon in his famous concept of the ‘Melanesian Way’.

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• The Boas Circle vs. White Supremacy

  History of Anthropology Review · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law
  Publisher

• Voicing the Ancestors: Readings for the Present from Anthropology's Past

  American Anthropologist · 2019-06-25 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• On History for the Present: Revisiting George Stocking's Influential Rejection of “Presentism”

  American Anthropologist · 2019-06-25 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• The Inspiration for the History of Anthropology Newsletter

  History of Anthropology Newsletter · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Roy Wagner

  Anthropology News · 2019-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Fieldwork Predecessors and Indigenous Communities in Native North America

  UNP - Nebraska eBooks · 2019-11-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• An Immigrant's View of “Amrika”

  Anthropology Now · 2018-01-02 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Deepak Singh. 2017. How May I Help You? An Immigrant's Journey from MBA to Minimum Wage. Oakland: University of California Press. 305 pages.I am in an electronics store in the shopping mall near my...

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Frequent coauthors

• Richard Handler

  University of Virginia

  4 shared

• Lise M. Dobrin

  University of Virginia

  3 shared

• Matti Bunzl

  Jewish Theological Seminary

  2 shared

• Andrew Orta

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  2 shared

• Daniel Rosenblatt

  2 shared

• Lisa M Dobrin

  1 shared

• Arzoo Osanloo

  1 shared

• Gregory Schrempp

  1 shared