Stanford University
Showing 11-20 of 30 Results
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Angela Garcia
Roger and Cynthia Lang Professor of Environmental Anthropology
BioResearch Area(s)
Culture and Society
Environmental Anthropology
Gender and Sexuality
Medical Anthropology
Political Anthropology and Political Economy
Race, Ethnicity, and Collective Identity
Materiality
Field of Interest(s)
Violence
Addiction
Kinship
Care
Environment
Landscape
Writing
Professor Garcia works at the intersection of violence, care, and form, asking how suffering is both endured and narrated, and what is at stake, ethically and politically, in the telling. Her research focuses on the intimate lives of the dispossessed and on the attachments, affects, and daily practices through which they work to hold their worlds together against forces designed to break them apart. Increasingly, her work has turned toward the ways ecological transformation, dispossession, and the built and unbuilt environment shape ethical and social life. Garcia is also attentive to narrative form as a means of apprehending historical and lived experience.
Garcia's most recent book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), takes readers inside Mexico City's anexos — informal, coercive rehabilitation clinics where the working poor treat drug addiction, and where violence itself is folded into the work of healing. Widely condemned as abusive, illegal, and unethical, anexos are nonetheless the primary resource for addiction treatment among Mexico's poor, spreading now across the United States as well. Garcia sets these spaces within the larger history and social fabric that produced them, showing how families turn to anexos not despite the violence of the drug war but because of it — as one of the only shelters available against a catastrophe that is at once historical, structural, and ongoing.
Garcia's first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along The Rio Grande (University of California Press, 2010), traced intergenerational heroin use among Hispanos in northern New Mexico back to a longer history of colonial dispossession — arguing that addiction there is less a private affliction than a collective, historically produced longing for connection and release.
Garcia's current projects extend this attention to land and its histories. The first project is a narrative nonfiction book titled The Devil's Backbone, which turns to Santa Rita del Cobre and the Chino Mine district near Silver City, New Mexico — a landscape scarred by conquest, extraction, and ecological ruin. Drawing on Garcia's own family history alongside ethnographic and archival research, the book brings back to life a racially segregated company town that was erased as the mine expanded. Moving from present to past, surface to subsurface, the book traces four generations of labor and loss experienced by Mexican and Mexican-American miners, unearthing new ways of thinking about environmental, social, and family history. It also reveals the difficult necessity of remaining resilient amid ongoing environmental and existential catastrophe.
The second project examines Mexico City's desagüe — the vast drainage project Spanish colonists began carving into the Valley of Mexico in the seventeenth century, and which continues, centuries later, to reshape the city's water, bodies, and disease. Still incomplete and still consequential, the desagüe becomes a lens onto some of the most urgent questions of our moment: water scarcity, the human entanglement with changing ecologies, and the slow violence of chronic illness. Garcia asks how this centuries-old engineering project continues to remake neighborhoods, bodies, and social worlds from underground up.
Garcia’s work has received major awards in anthropology and writing. She is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. -
M. Elizabeth Grávalos
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
BioDr. Grávalos is an anthropological archaeologist that studies Indigenous Andean communities in the deep past, for whom we have no written records. She looks at Andean ways of making things—like ceramics, textiles, and cordage—to understand the sociopolitics that undergirded these making practices, including engagements with specific substances and landscapes. With theoretical foci on materiality, ontology, and social practice, this research asks: what are the political affordances of specific materials? How did materials bridge possibilities for political action? How did people’s engagements with specific landscapes and materials impact power dynamics, economies, and social identities? To think through these questions, her work bridges humanities and science perspectives, blending insights from anthropological theory and cultural geography with material science techniques.
Dr. Grávalos’s research is based in the Ancash Region of northern Peru, where her ongoing investigation into political geologies considers how geologic resources are culturally made and valued, and how categorizations and use of these geomaterials foment political dynamics among pre-Hispanic and present-day Andean communities.
Dr. Grávalos is trained as a field archaeologist and materials analysis specialist. Since 2009, she has participated in and directed research projects in Peru, the Bahamas, and the city of Chicago (USA). She is committed to collaboration with descendant communities and centers community-based methodologies in her research. Dr. Grávalos is also an expert in ceramic compositional analysis (LA-ICP-MS and thin section petrography) as well as textile analysis. -
Thomas Hansen
Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAnthropology of political life, ethno-religious identities, violence and urban life in South Asia and Southern Africa. Multiple theoretical and disciplinary interests from political theory and continental philosophy to psychoanalysis, comparative religion and contemporary urbanism
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Ian Hodder
Dunlevie Family Professor, Emeritus
BioIan Hodder joined the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology in September of 1999. Among his publications are: Symbols in Action (Cambridge 1982), Reading the Past (Cambridge 1986), The Domestication of Europe (Oxford 1990), The Archaeological Process (Oxford 1999). Catalhoyuk: The Leopard's Tale (Thames and Hudson 2006), and Entangled. An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things (Wiley and Blackwell, 2012). Professor Hodder has been conducting the excavation of the 9,000 year-old Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk in central Turkey since 1993. The 25-year project has three aims - to place the art from the site in its full environmental, economic and social context, to conserve the paintings, plasters and mud walls, and to present the site to the public. The project is also associated with attempts to develop reflexive methods in archaeology. Dr. Hodder is currently the Dunlevie Family Professor Emeritus.
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Miyako Inoue
Associate Professor of Anthropology and, by courtesy, of Linguistics
BioMiyako Inoue teaches linguistic anthropology and the anthropology of Japan. She also has a courtesy appointment with the Department of Linguistics.
Her first book, titled, Vicarious Language: the Political Economy of Gender and Speech in Japan (University of California Press), examines a phenomenon commonly called "women's language" in Japanese modern society, and offers a genealogy showing its critical linkage with Japan's national and capitalist modernity. Professor Inoue is currently working on a book-length project on a social history of “verbatim” in Japanese. She traces the historical development of the Japanese shorthand technique used in the Diet for its proceedings since the late 19th century, and of the stenographic typewriter introduced to the Japanese court for the trial record after WWII. She is interested in learning what it means to be faithful to others by coping their speech, and how the politico-semiotic rationality of such stenographic modes of fidelity can be understood as a technology of a particular form of governance, namely, liberal governance. Publication that has come out of her current project includes, "Stenography and Ventriloquism in Late Nineteenth Century Japan." Language & Communication 31.3 (2011).
Professor Inoue's research interest: linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, semiotics, linguistic modernity, anthropology of writing, inscription devices, materialities of language, social organizations of documents (filing systems, index cards, copies, archives, paperwork), voice/sound/noise, soundscape, technologies of liberalism, gender, urban studies, Japan, East Asia. -
Lochlann Ross Jain
Professor of Anthropology
BioJain is an award-winning author and Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, Visiting Chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’ College London, and a Research Affiliate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. His work aims to unsettle some of the deeply held assumptions about objectivity that underlie the history of medical research. Jain is the author of Injury (Princeton UP: 2006); Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (UC Press: 2013); and a book of drawings, Things that Art: A Graphic Menagerie of Enchanting Curiosity (U of Toronto Press: 2019).
Jain is currently working on two books. The first, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, develops the concept of The WetNet, which refers to fluid bonding among humans and animals in ways that create pathways for the transmission of pathogens. Specifically, mid-century bioscientific practices such as blood harvesting and transfusion, and vaccine development and testing involved exchanges in human and animal effluvia, the risks of which have largely been disavowed. Jain’s current book project elucidates the concept of The WetNet through a rigorous history of the hepatitis B virus and the development of the first hepatitis B vaccine.
The second project, “The Lung is a Bird and a Fish,” is a cultural history of drowning in prose and drawing. -
Richard Klein
Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Anthropology and of Biology, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCoevolution of human form and behavior over the past 6-7 million years, with special emphasis on the emergence of fully modern humans in the past 60-50,000 years. Field and lab research in South Africa.
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Matthew Kohrman
Associate Professor of Anthropology, and by courtesy, of Medicine (Stanford Prevention and Research Center) and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
BioMatthew Kohrman’s research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, raises questions about how embodied aspects of human existence, such as our gender, such as our ability to propel ourselves through space as walkers, cyclists and workers, become founts for the building of new state apparatuses of social provision, in particular, disability-advocacy organizations. Over the last decade, Prof. Kohrman has been involved in research aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking among Chinese citizens. This work, as seen in his recently edited volume--Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives--expands upon heuristic themes of his earlier disability research and engages in novel ways techniques of public health, political philosophy, and spatial history. More recently, he has begun projects linking ongoing interests at the intersection of phenomenology and political economy with questions regarding environmental attunement and the arts.
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Tanya Marie Luhrmann
Albert Ray Lang Professor
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHer work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic.
