Commentary, reviews and other supporting material.

University of California Press site for "America's Top Pundits"

Buy Why America's Top Pundit Are Wrong from Amazon.com

Contributors

Catherine Besteman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. She is author of Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) and editor of Violence: A Reader (Palgrave and New York University Press, 2002).
Email Catherine Besteman

Tone Bringa is a Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute. With director Debbie Christie, she made the documentary film Bosnia: We Are All Neighbors for the Disappearing World Series of Granada Television. She is author of Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton University Press, 1995).

Keith Brown holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago and is Assistant Research Professor at the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. He is author of The Past in Question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation (Princeton University Press, 2003), and a number of other publications focusing on the role of culture in Balkan politics and history.

Hugh Gusterson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. He is author of Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (University of California Press, 1996) and People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). His articles have appeared in numerous academic journals as well as in the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune, Tikkun, New Scientist, and The Sciences.
Email Hugh Gusterson

Angelique Haugerud is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She is author of The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya (Cambridge University Press, 1995), coeditor (with M. Priscilla Stone and Peter D. Little) of Commodities and Globalization: Anthropological Perspectives (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), and coeditor (with Marc Edelman) of Anthropology of Development and Globalization: From Classical Political Economy to Contemporary Neoliberalism (Blackwell, forthcoming).

Stefan Helmreich is Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. His book Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (University of California Press, 1998) examines the practices of theoretical biologists at the Santa Fe Institute for the Sciences of Complexity in New Mexico and explores the narratives scientists employ to enliven the evolutionary worlds they simulate in silicon. His latest research, reported in "Trees and Seas of Information: Alien Kinship and the Biopolitics of Gene Transfer in Marine Biology and Biotechnology" (American Ethnologist 30, no. 3 [2003]: 341-59), concerns the ways marine biologists are using genomics and biotechnology to reimagine and reframe their scientific portraits of the ocean.

Ellen Hertz is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology at Neuch{ac}tel, Switzerland. She works in the area of legal and institutional anthropology and has published on China (The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market [Cambridge University Press, 1998]) and on financial workers and the welfare state.

Jonathan Marks is a biological anthropologist currently teaching at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His primary area of research is molecular anthropology—the application of genetic data to illuminate our place in the natural order—or more broadly, the area of overlap between (scientific) genetic data and (humanistic) self-comprehension. His research has been published in scientific and scholarly journals ranging from Nature through the Journal of Human Evolution to History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences; and he is the coauthor of Evolutionary Anthropology (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1993) and author of Human Biodiversity (Aldine de Gruyter, 1995) and What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee (University of California Press, 2002), which was awarded the W. W. Howells Prize in Biological Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.

Laura Nader is Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley. Among her published books are Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village (Stanford University Press, 1991); Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge (Routledge, 1996); and The Life of the Law: Anthropological Projects (University of California Press, 2002).

Carolyn Nordstrom is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame. Her academic books include Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-first Century (University of California Press, 2004); A Different Kind of War Story (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Stories of Violence and Survival (University of California Press, 1995); and The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror (University of California Press, 1992). She has written over three dozen articles on issues of political violence and peace-building, war economies and transnational criminal systems, cultures of globalization, gender and children in war zones, and cultural theory. She serves as associate editor for several journals and book series and is active with a number of international grants and symposia (the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, United States Institute of Peace, and Social Science Research Council).

Heather Paxson has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University (1998) and is Lecturer in Anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece (University of California Press, 2004).

Kath Weston directs the Women, Gender, and Sexuality program at Harvard University. She is the author of several books, including Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age (Routledge, 2002) and Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science (Routledge, 1998).

Site maintained by Alexander Brown
Last update: 01/22/05