Directory

I have taught Anthropology and African Studies at Colby since 1994. My teaching interests focus most particularly on the roots of violent conflict and the forces that sustain inequality and produce poverty. My first major research project was in southern Somalia in the late 1980s, just prior to the civil war. The articles and books I wrote about my research with Somali Bantu communities along the Jubba River Valley seek to explain why this population was so victimized during the war. Many of the surviving refugees from the villages in which I worked now live in Lewiston Maine, and we are working together to document what happened to them since the outbreak of civil war in 1991.

I also study post apartheid transformation in Cape Town, South Africa, with a particular focus on local activisits working to overcome Cape Town's enduring patterns of racism and poverty.

http://www.americastoppundits.net

Somali Bantu Refugees in the USSince 2003, Lewiston, Maine has become home to thousands of Somali and Somali Bantu refugees. My current research documents their experiences and how their presence has transformed Lewiston. View the website created by Colby students, members of Lewiston's Somali Bantu community, and me: The Somali Bantu Experience: From East Arica to Maine

Post Apartheid Transformation in Cape Town This research project studies the challenges of effecting transformation in a city left with enduring material and ideological divisions after apartheid transformation in Cape Town will be published in a book. Transforming Cape Town, (University of California Press 2008) follows the efforts of 6 projects of transformation, chronicling the success and failures of new grassroots initiatives to combat poverty, transform education, and support youth development.

Public Anthropology Anthropology is a discipline of profound importance in a globalized world. Demonstrating anthropology's critical insights on contemporary issues is the central project of two coedited books with anthropology Hugh Gusterson (George Mason University). The Insecure American will be published by University of California Press in 2009. Click on this link to learn about Why America's Top Pundits are Wrong: Pundits

Click on this link to read the pledge against anthropological involvement in covert intelligence work: Pledge

The Insecure American, coedited with Hugh Gusterson, University of California Press, 2009

Transforming Cape Town, University of California Press, 2008

	In Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back (University of California Press), coedited with Hugh Gusterson, anthropologists challenge the portrait of the post Cold War world promoted by some of American's foremost commentators.
	Violence: A Reader (Palgrave Press and New York University Press) is a collection of significant theoretical and ethnographic studies of violence by social scientists.
	Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press) is an ethnographic account of life in the Middle Jubba Valley of Somalia just before the civil war began.
	The Struggle for Land in Southern Somalia: The War Behind the War (Westview Press and Haan Publishing), edited with Lee V. Cassanelli, analyzes the historical factors that contributed to the patterns of violence in southern Somalia during the civil war.