Our Deparment | Research Interests | Theory and Method | Department History
Our contemporary world has been marked by profound restructurings of global politics, economics, and social life, and by emergent concerns relating to religion, health, and security. At the same time, developments in the health sciences and social sciences are provoking complex sets of questions relating to ethics, politics, and life itself that exceed existing disciplinary boundaries. Spanning the humanities and social sciences in a unique manner, anthropology has emerged as a discipline crucial to shaping critical engagement with these diverse questions. Our research work in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins is oriented toward the investigation of crosscutting themes of trans-regional concern. We take non-European anthropological traditions as definitive of the discipline itself, instead of defining a distinctive break between dominant anthropologies and world anthropologies. We take field research as productive of theories of knowledge, rather than as a mode of data collection alone. And due in part to this vision of field research, we place ethnography in a mutually productive dialogue with philosophy and social theory.
A central theme in faculty and graduate student research has concerned questions of the everyday. Many of our faculty and graduate students, for example, have conducted field research in situations of turbulence and outright violence. Rather than relying on tropes such as that of horror and loss of humanity under such circumstances, they have paid attention to how violence may be understood as embedded in the everyday rather than taken always as an interruption of it. Several of our faculty have developed overlapping theories of the everyday that have challenged dominant models of trauma theory in the understanding of social suffering.
A second theme is the anthropological critique of theories of state and economy. Faculty in the department have widely challenged predominantly spatial and territorial models of the state, tracing sovereignty instead at spatial and temporal margins, and showing how affect, disposition, and uncertainty can be understood as important registers of politics and economy. Themes relating to the material and moral forms of the state are explored in the published and ongoing work of many in the department. We also examine how the law, biological relatedness, and sexuality converge to render uncertain the meaning of such things as the family and paternity.
A third theme uniting our faculty is the anthropology of religion. Drawing on expertise in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam (in the Middle East and South Asia, both Shi’a and Sunni), Judaism, Protestant Christianity, and “secular” philosophical traditions on issues such as asceticism, we raise conceptual questions to guide research across diverse traditions. Over the past three years, we have run conferences resonant with religious themes, such as “Newness and Tradition” and “Number as Inventive Frontier.” Recent publications have investigated religious intersections with the everyday, virtues and cultivation of the self, and the economy. New and ongoing projects examine modesty and moral regulation in relation to dress and public appearance in Iran; addictions and religion among the urban poor in Santiago; and Nigerian global commerce, divination and futures.
The anthropology of media and the related pursuit of visual anthropology is one more significant field of emergent interest among many faculty and graduate students in the department. This collective interest is evidenced in an examination of how media technology shapes perception, affect, and governance, with respect to visual culture in Peru, for example, or commercial film production in south India. Our faculty have worked to curate photographic and museum exhibitions, and to produce documentary film. Despite our diverse angles of engagement, we share a concern for technical aspects and instruments of media production, building outward into multiple engagements with science and technology studies.
The Department emphasizes the importance of ethnographic research methods, conducted through intensive fieldwork in a single site or in a network of sites. Our ethnographic research has involved both innovative engagement and solid grounding in multiple anthropological traditions. Faculty and graduate students have conducted longitudinal studies through repeated field visits, combined quantitative and qualitative methods, explored novel methods in archival research, and followed networks and movements of people, institutions, and ideas across dispersed sites.
We take ethnography as generative of anthropological theory and objects of anthropological reflection, rather than merely as a mode of collecting data, making observations, or illustrating theoretical claims. Our emphasis on the link between theory and ethnography reflects the dynamism of the interdisciplinary conversation animating work within the department, which places our work in a mutually productive conversation with scholars and scholarship in philosophy and social and political theory. These concerns are reflected in the topics of recent conferences and discussion organized by faculty and graduate students alike, on topics such as animality, newness, locality, affect, number, and the concept of the “empirical.” We are deeply invested in carrying forward and sustaining such dialogue across the humanities and social sciences.
The interdisciplinary character of our conversations is also manifested in our approach to the themes of health and well-being. We do not distinguish, for example, between “medical anthropology” and mainstream anthropology. Rather, we seek to integrate questions of health, broadly speaking, into several research domains, such as economy, family, state practices, and religion. We foster cross-disciplinary dialogue with public health, history of medicine, and the humanities. An ongoing Critical Global Health seminar series draws together scholars working in anthropology, public health, history of medicine, and history.
The Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins is one of the few in the United States that was founded—and had developed organically—as a department specializing in socio-cultural anthropology. The department was created on the initiative of Dean George Owen and historians linked to the Atlantic Program in History, Culture, and Society. In the fall of 1973, the Rockefeller Foundation financed two positions in history and two positions in anthropology as part of the newly created Atlantic Program. In 1974-75, Sidney W. Mintz, Richard Price, and Emily Martin, all three of whom had moved from Yale, started teaching at Hopkins. Founding members of the faculty focused attention on matters of political economy, globalization, and transnational forms of social and political organization, working at the intersection of anthropology and history. Our current research themes build upon and carry forward these founding concerns, routed now through a renewed emphasis on ethnography, its pursuit across diverse scales of analysis, and the use of novel conceptual prisms.
Past Faculty:
Talad Asad, Eytan Bercovitch, Jean Besson, Donald Carter, David W. Cohen, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Hill Gates, Ashraf Ghani, Suzanne Kuechler, Ruby Lal, Beatriz Lavandera, Hy van Long, Emily Martin, Sheryl McCurdy, Felicity Northcott-Grant, Gyan Pandey, Sally Price, Richard Price, Kathleen Ryan, Sonia Ryang, William Sturtevant, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Katherine Verdery, Yun-xiang Yan
Past Visiting Faculty:
Robert McCormick Adams, Sandra Barnes, Fredrik Barth, Maurice Bloch, Fenella Canell, Hill Gates, Dell Hymes, Murray Last, Sir Edmund Leach, Barbara Little, Stuart McLean, Deepak Mehta, Johan V. Murra, Kalpana Ram, Wendy Richardson, John Rickford, Jennifer Robertson, David Scott, Michael Silverstein, S. Hoon Song, Sharon Stevens, Stanley Tambiah, Paul Trawick, Arturo Warman, Harriett Whitehead, Brackette F. Williams
Our Deparment | Research Interests | Theory and Method | Department History |
