Personal Profile

I am an anthropologist with an interdisciplinary orientation and interests in political economy and urban processes. I was born and educated in the United States (Hawai’i, California, and New York), but I have lived in Latin America (Costa Rica and Ecuador) for much of my adult life. Like many anthropologists and migratory persons, my perspective has been shaped by movement between places and settings. Above all, my research and writing are driven by my desire to understand how people make, sustain, and unmake worlds, through actions and decisions big and small, in executive suites, government offices, neighbourhoods, and households—and always in the context of a global market. I try to analyse this process by attending to multiple geographical and temporal scales at once; to see the global in the local, the past in the present—and maybe get a glimpse of the future there, too.  

Anthropology appealed to me in the first place because it seemed to offer a broader, more inclusive approach to history, one more adequate to the world as I knew it. In Honolulu, where I grew up, the past was often denied, ignored, or repackaged for easy consumption, even more so as we approached neoliberalism’s apex. But I was never convinced by the end of history. There was too much of it around me: Family narratives of the Great Depression and World Wars brought from England, Ohio, and Oceania; the shadow of nuclear annihilation; regular news from the Central American revolutions. I knew that the land I inhabited had been lived on very differently before me, and could see the intervening layers of violent and exploitative global interconnections: forests denuded for the sandalwood trade, whales hunted to near extinction, a people dispossessed to make way for plantations worked by a trans-oceanic labour force, then tourism, suburban developments and military bases.

At Berkeley in the late 1990s I found another aspect of world-making: people coming together with the intention of acting together. I developed a fascination for such moments, which can be more or less routine, more or less ambitious, but amidst all the hierarchies and compulsions that surround us, always seem somewhat extraordinary. I have since continued to encounter people taking action, and perhaps more surprisingly, emphasising the value of equal participation while doing so: in alter-globalization, racial justice, and anti-war organizing in California and New York; in the movements against the Central American Free Trade Agreement in Costa Rica and for tenants’ rights in Brooklyn; in the defence of Indigenous territories in Chiapas and in Quito. I saw how people articulated their actions with others to make bigger movements, and also how most--but not all--of them dispersed or faded away sooner or later. I became increasingly curious as to the how and why of it all. Questions about individual and collective agency and efficacy, about the practical, intellectual and affective dimensions of action—and of the absence of action—have followed me, provoked and inspired, as I have moved between different contexts of research, teaching, and political and intellectual engagement, while trying to make sense of changing times.

Action of that kind is often best apprehended ethnographically—going to meetings, hitting the pavement, reflecting together on successes and setbacks. But I am also convinced that those moments cannot be understood by themselves, or only on their own terms: understanding them means confronting the many ways our creative capacities—to make things and to make social worlds—are otherwise mobilised, harnessed, controlled, and appropriated by political and economic processes that are ultimately global in scope, and that are difficult to conceptualize, much less to act on. Given these challenges, I have been particularly interested in how, and how often, people act to sustain economic forms at variance with the global capitalist template. I have found that the homogenization of economic institutions has been both real and limited, in part because of defensive actions that were often self-consciously “anti-neoliberal,” and sometimes a bit utopian. The maintenance of institutions can be a world-making endeavour.   

In order to understand the different forms and scales in which worlds are made, I have cultivated an interdisciplinary approach that draws widely from the social sciences. I received my PhD under the direction of the geographer David Harvey, with the mentorship of the anthropologists Marc Edelman and Katherine Verdery, and the teaching and guidance of many others. I have further developed my approach to research within a series of spaces for interdisciplinary collaboration, including the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the City University of New York, and the National Center for Strategy on the Right to Territory and the Center for Public Economics at the National Institute for Advanced Study in Quito, Ecuador.

I think that an interdisciplinary approach makes for good anthropology, because I have always thought that anthropology's main strength is in the breadth of its vision. While most disciplines confine themselves to narrow silos, dividing up reality in artificial ways, anthropology is not constrained to consider any one aspect of life in isolation, or any one history. This means, in the first place, that it can often provide fuller, more convincing explanations of how we make, and live in, our worlds. At the same time, this relatively un-disciplined questioning, together with its concern to take account of the full record of human experience, thought, and action, also positions anthropology to shine a uniquely critical light on the common sense of our times. I think our times demand nothing less.