Bruce Knauft
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor
PhD University of Michigan, 1983
Anthropology 213
404-727-5769
knauft@learnlink.emory.edu
Professor Knauft's research combines politico-economic and cultural analysis across different world areas. He is particularly interested in issues of collective and individual subjectivity in relation to structures of social inequality and political domination or disempowerment, both historically and in the present. Across geographic and temporal scales, Dr. Knauft has been concerned with the critical and comparative theorization of social and cultural responses to imperialism and neo-imperialism, on the one hand, and civil strife, on the other, including in circumstances of underdevelopment and responses to development schemes in different world areas. Dr. Knauft's publications have addressed issues of modernity and marginality, social and critical theory, politics and violence; and gender and sexuality.
Originally trained as a cultural anthropologist, Dr. Knauft conducted two years of doctoral research among the Gebusi, a remote rainforest people of Papua New Guinea with whom he still maintains contact. During his twenty-one years at Emory, he has developed comparative interests and mentored student research across a braod range of world areas, topics, and disciplinary perspectives. In addition to Melanesia, he also has scholarly interest in West and East Africa and South and Inner Asia as well as other world areas.
Dr. Knauft's seven books include The Gebusi: Lives Transformed in a Rainforest World (McGraw-Hill, 2nd Edition, 2010); Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Edited, Indiana University Press, 2002); Exchanging the Past (University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology (Routledge Press, 1996).