Doctoral dissertations are an excellent indicator of the health of a discipline. They are a weather vane pointing toward where the discipline is heading. They represent a huge chunk of work by the researcher and his/her mentors as well as generous contributions from people in the field site(s). With luck, they are a crucial basis for a newly minted PhD to getting a job to which all the years of training and research will contribute. Dissertations are very important documents, and they deserve more visibility.
Last year, to mark the end of 2009, I created an annotated list of my favorite 25 North American cultural anthropology dissertations. It was based on a rapid scan of an electronic database of dissertations available through my university’s library. The list contained rich examples of what 2009 had produced, but it excluded many more excellent dissertations on important topics that (a) I didn’t include in the interest of keeping the list reasonably short and (b) that my search simply missed. I well know about (b) because I did a re-search, out of interest, a few days ago and was stunned to see so many exciting studies pop up that I hadn’t known about last year.
In any case, we must move on to 2010. This year, I did a similar search using terms such as health, inequality, gender, violence, environment, family, and population.
Instead of a list of 25, I have included 40 dissertations. In spite this substantial increase, I am nonetheless certain that the list omits many important theses. The list, thus, is just a tantalizing sample of a much wider universe of exciting work completed in 2010. Furthermore, by including only North American theses, the list excludes many dissertations submitted in the rest of the world. One can only imagine the entire spectrum of riches untapped.
On a brighter note: as the 40 dissertations demonstrate, cultural anthropologists are producing in-depth knowledge about important global issues.
My apologies to the authors for reducing their abstracts to around 100 words each and for the deep editorial cuts involved. Please forgive me for any misrepresentations this degree of editing can create.
The 2010 list is presented here in alphabetical order, by last name of the author:
- Elite Landowners in Santarem: Ranchers, Gauchos and the Arrival of Soybeans in the Amazon, by Ryan T. Adams. Indiana University. Advisor: Richard Wilk.
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of large-scale landowners in Santarém, Pará State, Brazil. I investigated immigrant large-scale farmers who were using industrial farming techniques, as well as the established local elite who were mainly engaged in large-scale ranching and business. The research asks whether or not the two groups of large-scale landowners would form a single landed elite class, as implied by a class analysis based in political economy. This research has implications for understanding of agricultural expansion in the Amazon.
- Belonging to the (S)Oil: Multinational Oil Corporations, NGOs and Community Conflict in Postcolonial Nigeria, by Omolade Adunbi. Yale University. Advisor: Kamari Clarke.
This dissertation examines what oil and land represent in the Niger Delta. I investigate how contestations over oil and land resources are redefining and reproducing new forms of power, governance, and belonging. I examine how the physical presence of oil drilling platforms, flow stations, and pipelines represent a promise of widespread wealth, while the realities of resource control and legal institutions of the state have excluded local people from the benefits of oil modernity. This ethnography maps how these exclusions create conditions of possibilities for the establishment of competing governmentalities through the mobilization of political organizing against the state and multinational corporate control of land and oil in the Niger Delta.
- Stepping Outside the Ring: An Ethnography of Intimate Associations in Japanese Professional Sumo, by Nanao Akanuma. University of California, Irvine. Advisor: Mei Zhan.
This dissertation is about the embodied professional lifecycles of sumo professionals, or rikishi in Japanese. I examine the ways in which they enter, train, socialize into, and retire from Japanese professional sumo. My ethnographic fieldwork reveals that sumo is neither a sport nor a tradition. Rather, it is the world of relations and different characters: sumo stars, unsuccessful lower-ranked sumo professionals, entrepreneurial-minded sumo masters, wives and daughters of the sumo heya (dormitory-cum-training facility of sumo apprenticeship), media reporters, fans, and spectators. I explore the lifecycles of sumo and how each stage of the professional lifecycle opens up a stage for particular sets of relations for them.
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