Cultural Anthropology

Among the topical interests of the cultural anthropology faculty are gender and sexuality, culture and power, modernity and consumption, kinship and relatedness, tourism and popular culture, medical anthropology, science and technology studies, human and political ecology, pastoralism, conservation and sustainability, museums, semiotics, concepts of “care,” nationalism and ethnic identity, racial constructs, post-colonialism, refugees and citizenship, and history and memory. Areas of regional expertise in the department include Latin America and the Caribbean, Native America, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, East Africa, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and Papua New Guinea, as well as their respective diasporas around the world.

In addition, the cultural anthropology faculty share an interest in globalization, using ethnographic skills to understand the contemporaneous but countervailing forces that encourage both global homogenization and local fragmentation.  Processes related to globalization studied by cultural anthropologists and graduate students include the increasingly planetary integration of the economy; the spread of human insecurity with the proliferation of ethnic and religious conflict, violence, crime, disease, and financial volatility; the global depletion and degradation of environmental resources; the impact of tourism and large-scale development projects; the internationalization of environmental, feminist, religious, and human rights movements; the response to democratic structures; the rise of “world cities;” the spread of new information and communication technologies; and the increasingly global flows of popular media, advertising and consumer goods.  The cultural anthropology faculty’s interest in processes of globalization, human ecology, and applied anthropology also intersect with areas of specialization in archaeology and biological anthropology.
 

Cultural Faculty

• Alison Cool– Medical anthropology and the anthropology of science and technology;
• Kathryn Goldfarb – Kinship and relatedness, mental health and neuroscience, child welfare, Japan;
• Donna M. Goldstein – medical anthropology, political economy, anthropology of science, Latin America;
• Kira Hall – Linguistic Anthropology. Department of Linguistics;
• Christian Hammons – Ethnographic film, politics of indigenous religion, exchange, tourism, development, and globalization in Southeast Asia
• Jerry Jacka – political ecology, resource development, Papua New Guinea
• Carla Jones – Globalization, subjectivity & governmentality, critical gender theory of Indonesia
• J. Terrence McCabe – Human adaptations to arid land and savanna ecosystems, pastoralism, East Africa
• Carole McGranahan** – Issues of power in local, global, historical contexts in Tibet and the Himalayas
• L. Kaifa Roland – Tourism, globalization, racialized national identities in Cuba, Latin America and the Caribbean
• Jen Shannon – Curator of cultural anthropology within the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History

(** Not accepting graduate students at this time.)