Corinne Kratz
Professor, Joint appointment in Institute of African Studies
PhD University of Texas-Austin 1988
Anthropology 218B
404-727-1036
ckratz@emory.edu
My research and writing combine interests in performance theory and analysis,
the history and politics of representation in visual and verbal media, ritual studies, and
the cultural politics of ethnic identity and gender relations. All these areas are
encompassed more generally in the study of culture and communication. My research
and writing have a strong ethnographic grounding that speaks to methodological and epistemological questions as well. I have been working in eastern Africa with Okiek
communities since the mid 1970s; in 1990 I began a comparative project on exhibitions
and cultural display. My most recent books are The Ones that are Wanted:
Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition (University of California Press, 2002) and a co-edited volume entitled Museum
Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (Duke University Press, 2006). The Ones That are Wanted follows a traveling exhibition, Okiek Portraits, from its
beginnings in Kenya through showings at seven venues, including the National Museum
in Nairobi and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington,
D.C. The book examines how the exhibition developed, the stereotypes it sought to
challenge, how local commentaries were incorporated, how different installations recast
the exhibition, and the different ways that visitors in Kenya and the United States
understood it. It received the Collier Prize for Still Photography awarded by the Society
for Visual Anthropology in 2003 and Honorable Mention for the Arnold Rubin
Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association
in 2004.
Museum Frictions is the third volume of a series on culture, society and museums that began with Exhibiting Cultures and was followed by Museums and Communities. The outcome of a series of international workshops and conferences supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, Museum Frictions considers the place of museums in global cultural spheres and examines a variety of museums and other display contexts, including papers from or about virtually every continent and authors from North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia.
I am currently working on three major book projects:
1. Looking for the Hairless Cow: Arranging Okiek Marriage. This monograph on Okiek marriage arrangement in Kenya looks at different images of identity, personhood, and social relations in the discourse and performance of marriage meetings, setting them in the context of wider historical processes of Okiek life. It grows directly from my book on initiation ceremonies, Affecting Performance: Meaning, Movement, and Experience in Okiek Women’s Initiation.
2. Founding Exchanges: Producing Knowledge through Ethnographic Research. The essays in this collection consider the communicative foundations and dynamics of key methods in ethnographic research and analysis, exploring their epistemological grounds and tracing their histories across multiple disciplines and settings.
3. Museums and the Cultural Imagination. This project focuses on the poetics and politics of public cultural displays in a range of settings, including museums, festivals, theme parks, historical re-enactments, etc. It is being done in collaboration with Ivan Karp of Emory's Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.
I co-direct the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship with Ivan Karp. Since 2000, CSPS has been the home of Institutions of Public Culture, a collaborative program that has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and Emory University. The Institutions of Public Culture program fosters exchange and linkages among museums, universities, and cultural institutions in Atlanta and South Africa through fellowships, internships, workshops, and seminars. CSPS also organizes an extensive Grant Writing Program for Emory’s Graduate School in collaboration with the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry.
Courses Taught
ANT 202 Concepts and Methods in Cultural Anthropology
ANT 370 African Popular Culture
ANT 506 Culture and Power
ANT 585 Performance Theory and Analysis
ANT 585 Research Design and Proposal Writing in the Humanities