Donham, Donald L.

Department of Anthropology
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, California 95616, USA

dldonham@ucdavis.edu
Telephone:
Fax: (530) 752-8885
Office: 324 Young Hall

Education
As an undergraduate, I was educated in chemistry and mathematics at Baylor University, and I received a M.S. in chemistry from Stanford University. After teaching chemistry for two years at a historically black college in the South, I became interested in cultural anthropology and received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford in 1979. The following year, I was a postdoctoral student in economics at Cambridge University. In 1989-90, I was a Fellow at the Center of Advanced Research in the Behavioral Sciences and during 1999-2000, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Before coming to Davis, I taught at Stanford and at Emory University.

Research Interests
My principal focus of interest, over the past twenty years, has been understanding forms of power as they change over time, and the ways that economics systems intertwine with cultural forms in those transformations. I am particularly interested in historical methodology as it applies to ethnography, marxist and post-marxist social theories, the history of cultural anthropology, and the ways that race, gender, sexuality, and class interact in transnational settings.

My students currently work in Africa and the Middle East and are researching topics such as the culture of unemployed youth in urban Ethiopia, the politics of land and Zulu identity in rural South Africa, and the formation of new forms of religious piety among the Shi`i of Lebanon.

Recent Publications
History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Edited with Wendy James, Eisei Kurimoto, and Alessandro Triulzi, Remapping Ethiopia: Socialism and its Aftermath (Oxford: James Currey, 2002).
Thinking Temporally or Modernizing Anthropology, American Anthropologist 103 (2001): 134-149.
Freeing South Africa: The “Modernization” of Male-Male Sexuality in Soweto. Cultural Anthropology 13 (1998): 1-19. Reprinted in Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, Eds. The Anthropology of Globalization (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).