Catherine L. Besteman

Last updated

Catherine Lowe Besteman is an Italian American abolitionist educator at Colby College, where she holds the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Chair in Anthropology. Her research and practice engage the public humanities to explore abolitionist possibilities in Maine. She has taught at that institution since 1994. [1]

Contents

Her research has focused on security, militarism, displacement, and community-based activism and transformation, primarily based in Somalia, South Africa, and the U.S. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Arts, Wenner-Gren, and with a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has held other fellowships at the Institute of Advanced Study in Durham, UK, the Institute of Advanced Study at Stellenbosch University, Bellagio, and the School for Advanced Research, among others.

She also curates art exhibitions and public humanities initiatives, including Freedom & Captivity, a statewide collaborative public humanities initiative to envision and foster abolitionist visioning in Maine, and Making Migration Visible, a statewide arts-based initiative to change the narratives around migration in Maine.

Her work has been acknowledged with the 2021 Public Anthropologist Award (for Militarized Global Apartheid), the 2019 SANA (Society for the Anthropology of North America) Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America, and a Leeds Honor Book Award (for Transforming Cape Town).

She has published four monographs and eight edited or co-edited volumes. She taught previously at Queens College, City University of New York.

Early life and education

Besteman received her BA from Amherst College, and her MA and PhD from the University of Arizona. [1]

Career

Besteman’s areas of expertise include refugees, southern Somalia, South Africa, and, more generally, insecurity and violence, [2] and inequality and racism. She also specializes in studying humanitarianism and activism. She writes in support of an engaged approach to anthropology, which involves advocacy, teaching, and collaboration with the people who are the focus of study. [3] Besteman has studied Southern Somalia extensively, and has written a number of books and papers about this area. [4] She has criticized traditional anthropological and media portrayals of Somalis and of the Somalian civil war since it began in the early 1990s, [5] .

Research and work

Besteman began working in southern Somalia in the late eighties before the outbreak of civil war in 1991. [6] [7] Many refugees from the communities where she had worked in Somalia have resettled in Lewiston, Maine. [8] Under her direction, members of the local Bantu community and Colby College students have produced a wiki-type website about the Somali Bantus of Lewiston. A museum exhibition: "Rivers of Immigration: Peoples of the Androscoggin" was mounted at the Museum L-A, in conjunction with the wiki project, from 2009 to 2010. [9]

During the 2000s, Besteman studied Cape Town, South Africa, focusing on the work of grassroots organizations in the city after the end of apartheid. Her book Transforming Cape Town (2008) describes several of these organizations and contrasts incidents of traditionalism with those of innovation. [10]

Besteman received a Guggenheim Foundation grant and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship in 2012 to work on a book project. [11] [12] In late 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded her a residency for spring 2014. [13]

Besteman has co-edited three books for general readership with Hugh Gusterson: Why America’s Top Pundits are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back (2005), The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It (2009), and Life By Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World (2019).

Selected publications

Books

Papers

Related Research Articles

Black is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin color-based category for specific populations with a mid- to dark brown complexion. Not all people considered "black" have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the Western world, the term "black" is used to describe persons who are perceived as dark-skinned compared to other populations. It is most commonly used for people of sub-Saharan African ancestry, Indigenous Australians and Melanesians, though it has been applied in many contexts to other groups, and is no indicator of any close ancestral relationship whatsoever. Indigenous African societies do not use the term black as a racial identity outside of influences brought by Western cultures.

Political anthropology is the comparative study of politics in a broad range of historical, social, and cultural settings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Gabriel Seligman</span> British physician and ethnologist

Charles Gabriel Seligman FRS FRAI was a British physician and ethnologist. His main ethnographic work described the culture of the Vedda people of Sri Lanka and the Shilluk people of the Sudan. He was a professor at London School of Economics and was influential as the teacher of men who became influential anthropologists, such as Bronisław Malinowski, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Meyer Fortes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catholic Church in Somalia</span>

The Catholic Church in Somalia is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the Pope in Rome.

Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Audrey Richards</span> English anthropologist

Audrey Isabel Richards, CBE, FRAI, FBA, was a pioneering British social anthropologist. She produced notable ethnographic studies. The most famous of which is Chisungu: A Girl's initiation ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harald Prins</span> Dutch anthropologist and filmmaker

Harald E. L. Prins is a Dutch anthropologist, ethnohistorian, filmmaker, and human rights activist specialized in North and South America's indigenous peoples and cultures.

Carol Ann (Bunny) McBride is an American author of a wide range of nonfiction books on subjects ranging from cultural survival and wildlife conservation to Native Americans. Her most recent ethnohistory book is Indians in Eden: Wabanakis and Rusticators on Maine's Mt.Desert Island. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she regularly published her poetry and essays in the Christian Science Monitor, and reported on her travels in China, West Africa, East Africa, and northern Europe. Her articles appeared in various US newspapers and magazines, including the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune,International Wildlife, Travel & Leisure, Sierra, Yankee Magazine,Downeast, and Reader's Digest. From 1981 on, she was actively involved in oral history and community development projects with Micmac Indians in Maine.

The Somali Bantus are a Bantu ethnic minority group in Somalia who primarily reside in the southern part of the country, primarily near the Jubba and Shabelle rivers.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is an anthropologist, educator, and author. She is the Chancellor's Professor Emerita of Anthropology and the director and co-founder of the PhD program in Critical Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her writing on the anthropology of the body, hunger, illness, medicine, motherhood, psychiatry, psychosis, social suffering, violence and genocide, death squads, and human trafficking.

Cognitive anthropology is an approach within cultural anthropology and biological anthropology in which scholars seek to explain patterns of shared knowledge, cultural innovation, and transmission over time and space using the methods and theories of the cognitive sciences often through close collaboration with historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, linguists, musicologists, and other specialists engaged in the description and interpretation of cultural forms. Cognitive anthropology is concerned with what people from different groups know and how that implicit knowledge, in the sense of what they think subconsciously, changes the way people perceive and relate to the world around them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucy Mair</span> British anthropologist (1901-1986)

Lucy Philip Mair was a British anthropologist. She wrote on the subject of social organization, and contributed to the involvement of anthropological research in governance and politics. Her work on colonial administration was influential.

Hugh Gusterson is an English anthropologist at the University of British Columbia and George Washington University. His work focuses on nuclear culture, international security and the anthropology of science. His articles have appeared in the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Boston Review the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Foreign Policy, and American Scientist. He is a regular contributor to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and has a regular column in Sapiens, an anthropology journal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Somali slave trade</span>

The Somali slave trade existed as a part of the East African slave trade. To meet the demand for menial labor, Bantus from southeastern Africa slaves were exported from Zanzibar and were sold in cumulatively large numbers over the centuries to customers in East Africa and other areas in Northeast Africa and Asia. Ethiopians, especially Amharas and Tigrayans were also captured and sold to traders from Arabia, India, Greece, and beyond.

Eileen Jensen Krige (1905–1995) was a prominent South African social anthropologist noted for her research on Zulu and Lovedu cultures. Together with Hilda Kuper and Monica Wilson, she produced substantial works on the Nguni peoples of Southern Africa. Apart from her research she is considered to be one of the 'pioneering mothers' of the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa, where she taught from 1948 until retirement in 1970. She inspired many women to devote themselves to research. Krige is also associated with a group of South African anthropologists who were strongly against the segregation policies of apartheid in South Africa. These include amongst others, Isaac Schapera, Winifred Hoernlé, Hilda Kuper, Monica Wilson, Audrey Richards and Max Gluckman.

<i>Making Refuge</i> Non-fiction book written in 2016

Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine is a 2016 non-fiction book by Catherine L. Besteman, the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Winifred Hoernlé</span> South African anthropologist and social reformer

Agnes Winifred Hoernlé née Tucker was a South African anthropologist, widely recognized as the "mother of social anthropology in South Africa". Beyond her scientific work, she is remembered for her social activism and staunch disapproval of Apartheid based on white supremacy. Born in 1885 in the Cape Colony, as an infant she moved with her family to Johannesburg, where she completed her secondary education. After earning an undergraduate degree in 1906 from South African College, she studied abroad at Newnham College, Cambridge, Leipzig University, the University of Bonn, and the Sorbonne. Returning to South Africa in 1912, she undertook anthropological research among the Khoekhoe people, until she married in 1914.

Elaine Rosa Salo was a South African anthropologist, scholar and activist, who specialised in gender studies and African feminism. She taught at the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town, the University of Pretoria, and, until her death from cancer, at the University of Delaware.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Costs of War Project</span> American anti-war research project

The Costs of War Project is a nonpartisan research project based at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University that seeks to document the direct and indirect human and financial costs of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and related counterterrorism efforts. The project is the most extensive and comprehensive public accounting of the cost of post-September 11th U.S. military operations compiled to date.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Archie Mafeje</span> South African anthropologist and activist (1936–2007)

Archibald Boyce Monwabisi Mafeje, commonly known as Archie Mafeje, was a South African anthropologist and activist. Born in what is now the Eastern Cape, he received degrees from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of Cambridge. He became a professor at various universities in Europe, North America, and Africa. He spent most of his career away from apartheid South Africa after he was blocked from teaching at UCT in 1968.

References

  1. 1 2 "Catherine L. Besteman · College Directory". Colby College.
  2. ↑ Martin Shaw (19 September 2013). Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitions of the Late Modern World. Cambridge University Press. pp. 176–. ISBN   978-1-107-46910-5.
  3. ↑ Low, S. M., & Merry, S. E. (2010). Engaged anthropology: diversity and dilemmas. Current Anthropology, 51(S2), S203-S226.
  4. ↑ Mohamed Haji Mukhtar (25 February 2003). Historical Dictionary of Somalia. Scarecrow Press. pp. 332–. ISBN   978-0-8108-6604-1.
  5. ↑ Abdi Kusow (2004). Putting the cart before the horse: contested nationalism and the crisis of the nation-state in Somalia. Red Sea Press. p. 159. ISBN   978-1-56902-202-3.
  6. ↑ "Catherine Besteman". Global Experts.
  7. ↑ Aline Gubrium; Krista Harper (30 April 2013). Participatory Visual and Digital Methods. Left Coast Press. pp. 137–. ISBN   978-1-61132-711-3.
  8. ↑ William Haviland; Harald Prins; Dana Walrath; Bunny McBride (21 February 2013). Anthropology: The Human Challenge. Cengage Learning. pp. 398–. ISBN   978-1-133-94132-3.
  9. ↑ Androscoggin Bank. "Rivers of Immigration: Peoples of the Androscoggin" Archived 2013-10-29 at the Wayback Machine . museumla.org.
  10. ↑ Denis-Constant Martin (June 2013). Sounding the Cape Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa. African Minds. pp. 368–. ISBN   978-1-920489-82-3.
  11. ↑ "Catherine Besteman" Archived 2013-09-21 at the Wayback Machine . gf.org.
  12. ↑ "Catherine Besteman F'12". acls.org. Retrieved 2018-05-18.
  13. ↑ "Besteman receives Rockefeller Foundation grant" Archived 2016-01-05 at the Wayback Machine . thecolbyecho.com.
  14. ↑ Hannah Whittaker (13 October 2014). Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Kenya: A Social History of the Shifta Conflict, C. 1963-1968. BRILL. pp. 70–. ISBN   978-90-04-28308-4.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.