Department of Anthropology

The Department of Anthropology at Georgetown University includes a diverse group of scholars in cultural anthropology. Our research across the globe in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, Eurasia, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America addresses pressing global issues surrounding the new economy, gender, human rights, transnational migration, race, religion, social justice, and the law. Through our research we seek to attract students who are committed to understanding and communicating the complex linkages between culture and power in changing local, national and global circumstances.                                                     

      
Click here or on the image below to read about Professor Denise Brennan's teaching and the student activism it has inspired

The Scott MacPherson Stapleton Student Fellow Award honors the memory of Scott M. Stapleton, a student of Anthropology who graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 2005.

This award has been given as a gift to the Department of Anthropology from Scott’s family in their support of the discipline that he loved. The award is designed to support the research and intellectual motivations of talented and committed undergraduate students like him, and it seeks to provide students the opportunity to pursue their passions relating to anthropology outside the classroom. His family has generously made this Fellowship possible to support an anthropology student who, like Scott, can't wait to get out into the world. In particular, the Fellowship is designed to support students who want to work with an organization -- but can not afford to either because the "internship" is unpaid, or to do so would mean reducing hours in paid employment.

To learn more about this award, the incredible person it was named in honor of, and apply, click here.

The application is due on the last day of classes. Please contact Professor Denise Brennan if you have any questions and submit your application to Kurt Muhlbauer.

Mubbashir Rizvi Joins Anthropology Faculty

We are excited to announce that Mubbashir Rizvi will join our department in the Fall.

I came to cultural anthropology after studying political science and history. What attracted me to the discipline was its attention to the lived experience of ordinary people and communities as a way to understand large social phenomenon from the ground up. This ethnographic perspective has forced me to challenge my own presumptions about things I took for granted for instance the meaning of progress (as tied to belief in development) or at a more intimate level how one thinks about family, one's gender identity or even one's relationship to religion or the sacred. In my own work I have drawn on grounded yet comparative ethnographic approach to study topics as varied as hip hop subcultures, ethnic-religious nationalism in South Asia and the land rights movement that was the subject of my doctoral dissertation.

My ethnographic monograph analyzes the cultural significance of land relations and caste/religious identity to understand political subjectivity in Punjab, Pakistan. My ethnography details the sudden rise of a specific peasant movement under the banner of the Punjab Tenants Association in personal and localized ways. In doing so, it focuses on the life histories of peasant farmers, civil society organizations and local brokers involved in the struggle for land rights. The dissertation argues that land struggles should not only be understood in tropes of locality, but also as interconnected processes that attend to global and local changes in governance and development policies. To emphasize these connections, I posit a relational understanding of ‘politics of place’ that attends to a range of practices from the history of colonial infrastructure projects (the building of canals, roads and model villages), the memory of subsistence farming, and the present day precariousness of agriculture and migrant labor that sustains many rural households in central Punjab.

Within these parameters, my analysis of the political mobilization includes a description of the internal shifts in loyalties and alignments during the course of the movement by looking at how caste, religious and/or class relations are embedded in power relations that gain or lose significance in the process. My research seeks to counter the predominant understanding of Muslim subjectivity, which privileges religious beliefs over social practices and regional identity.

I am looking forward to teaching courses on Political Ecology, Social Movements and the Postcolonial Experience.

Young and Undocumented: The New American Story

Our own Susan Terrio organized a deeply moving event at the Wilson Center on the issues facing undocumented young people. Three Georgetown students -- two of whom are in our anthropology courses --- presented with extraordinary poise, skill, and eloquence. Click here to see the webcast of this wonderful event.

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