Ph.D. University of Sussex 1984

Specialties

Amerindian and Caribbean studies; the anthropology of knowledge, the anthropology of power, and the anthropology of emotion.

The disciplinary effects of anthropology have over the years gradually framed and reframed my current research interests.  They have done so as the hard-won legitimacies to speak and to write about the cultural forces contributing to the presence of human socialities in the Antilles and Amazonia.

During my time as a student at the London School of Economics and Political Science, their anthropology favored Structural-Marxism when it seemed the most likely theoretical paradigm to succeed.  Today, however, perhaps with greater vigor, I animadvert more about the differences between observing, interpreting, and describing the lived experiences of individuals in their various social worlds.

If I were to admit to any formal category from which I now teach and research, I think it would have to be that commonly referred to as “Philosophical Anthropology.”  My theoretical concerns have indeed been depicted as stemming from a subaltern consciousness, yet I intend neither to interrogate the scientific specificity of the anthropological project nor to place judgment upon its Euro-American emphasis.  Rather, I would like to site the interpretative limits of the project and, from there, embrace -- rather than evade -- the anthropological difficulties compromising humanistic descriptions of the fabulously different ways people live their lives.

Click here to view my complete list of publications and CV.

Selected Publications

Forthcoming - The Doubling: Preliminary Essays on Empathic Anthropology.

2011 - Abandoned People, Madness, and the Untranslatable. Centre for Amerindian, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of St. Andrews Occasional Publications 32.

2009 - Entrevista a Edith Turner”en AIBR.   Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 4 (3):i-xviii. 

2008 - The Tropal Dynamics of a Waiwai House. Ministry of Culture Youth and Sports, Guyana Government, Georgetown. 

2007 - Spiritual Translucency and Pornocratic Anthropology. Anthropology and Humanism 32 (2):192-201.

2007 - Guyanese Amerindian Epistemology: The Gift of Knowledge from a Pacifist Insurgence. In Race and Class 49:2.

2006 - The Triumph and Sorrow of Beauty: Comparing the Recursive, Contrapuntal, and Cellular Aesthetics of Being. In TIPITÍ: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, Vol.4; No.1&2.

2006 - Amerindian Modes of Knowledge. TIPITÍ: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 4 (1&2). (With Fernando Santos-Granero).

2006 - O triunfo e a dor da beleza: Coparando as estéticas recursive, contrapontística e cellular do ser. Revista de Antropologia 49 (1). In a Special Issue in honor of Professor Joanna Overing: In the World and About the World Amerindian Modes of Knowledge. George Mentore and Fernando Santos-Granero, eds.

The Doubling: Preliminary Essays on Empathic Anthropology.