Research Interests

My research focuses most generally on the analysis of society as spectacle, visual culture, and popular cultural performance in both Euro-North American and postcolonial societies. My earliest fieldwork with the European one-ring circus focused on politics and poetics of spectacle and performance in the making of an entertainment culture. My circus work concerned itself with the cultural production of the circus, with the dialogics and discourses of sight, and with contemporary encounters with circus artists. I am now in the process of writing the life histories of three circus artists in concert with a cultural and historical analysis of European circus spectacles and fascism in hopes of developing an idea about the varied crises of the modern, most significantly revealed by fascism. I have conducted research on tourist safaris in Kenya as spectacle productions, analyzing the visual politics of tourist experience and I am now conducting research on the rise of the tourist state in Belize . The Belize research turns its attention to how tourism becomes a significant modality through which transnational, late-modern, everyday life is organised and how tourist encounters opened imaginative spaces that stimulate new identity productions, highlight new aspects of social relations and interactions with nature that actively ensure new “fantasies of becoming” even as new social pressures develop to try and control the flows of tourist desire. I am interested in new ways of thinking about and through flows, processes, and interconnections in touristic encounters, productions and narratives as a means of tracking the enactments of citizenship under the pressures of local and global transformations. In sum, I work on questions of spectacle consumption, capitalism, and everyday life. Related to these interests are my concerns with questions of representation and interpretation opened up by post-structural approaches to socio-cultural analysis and an abiding interested in ethnographic writing as a performative process. I am also committed to keeping the crucial importance of politcal/historical/cultural reflection in the forefront of my research, teaching, and ethnographic practice.

Current Teaching Assignments

ANTH 4110 Development of Theory in Social Anthropology
ANTH 3350 Culture as Performance: The Anthropology of the Arts

Current Research

1. Ambivalent Paradise: Tourism in Belize . In April of 2003, I intend to begin research, conducted jointly with Dr. Theresa Holmes, on tourism in Belize. This project will develop a critical understanding of the production and consumption of culture and heritage, as they are fashioned within the context of tourism and global flows of capital and knowledge.

2. City States . A series of paper for The Cultures of Cities Project, a SSHRC funded Major Collaborative Research Grant.

3. When Francesco the Clown Met Ed Sullivan: Narratives of Longing in Circus Life.

Representative Publications