Kath Weston
Professor
Kath Weston is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1988. She has been the recipient of a British Academy Global Professorship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Science Foundation grants, and visiting professorships at Cambridge University and the University of Tokyo. In 2022 she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Queer Anthropologists.
Research areas:
Kinship, political ecology, capitalism and culture, STS anthropology, gendering and sexuality, identity politics, historical anthropology, embodiment and visceral engagement
Recent Articles:
"The Habit in Cohabitation (Or, How to Meet a Tiger on the Path)"
"Bequeathing a World: Ecological Inheritance, Generational Conflict, and Dispossession"
"Counterfactual Ethnography: Imagining What It Takes to Live Differently" / "Etnografía
contrafactual: Imaginando lo que se necesita para vivir de forma diferente"
Selected Books
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Published Books
Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World
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Traveling Light: On the Road with America's Poor
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Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship
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Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age
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Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science
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Projects in Process
Professor Weston's latest book project, Capitalism on Life Support, highlights the centuries-long interplay between science, medicine, and new forms of finance. When people try to explain what happens during a major market crash, why should a statement such as "the global economy just had a cardiac arrest" seem to make perfect sense? How did early modern European inquiries into blood circulation, reproduction, and the generation of organisms end up influencing today's debates about how to handle a financial crisis or which central bank policies to adopt (for instance, quantitative easing figured as the "spontaneous generation" of money)? Why would the creators of synthetic bonds style themselves as working in labs, while implicitly drawing on synthetic biology in the design of their products? How do cryptocurrency creation stories blur the boundaries between living and nonliving? In a digital era when money is no longer necessarily embodied even in paper or plastic, what is it about the medicalization of finance that makes body metaphors still so "good to think" when people try to grasp financial arrangements that even bankers find too complex to fathom?
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