Smith, James H.

James H. Smith
Associate Professor (effective July 2010)

PhD University of Chicago, 2002

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

jsmit@ucdavis.edu
Telephone: (530) 754-7503
Fax:  (530) 752-8885
Office: 323 Young

Education

2002, PhD, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago

1996, MA, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago

1993, BA, Majors in Anthropology and Social Thought/Political Economy (STPEC), University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Commonwealth Honors College)

Other: Rockefeller Fellowship in Religion, Conflict, and Peace-building at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the University of Notre Dame (2003-04).

Research Interests
The Social Life of Globalized Substances; DR Congo Coltan Mining and the Digital Age; Changing African Understandings of "Development"; Religious Utopias and Neotraditionalist Movements; Resource Struggles and Politics in Africa; Conflict, Violence, and Concepts of Peace; the Politics of Witchcraft and Sorcery in Africa; Contemporary State Transformation; the Cultural and Political Consequences of Neoliberalism; Africa (especially East and Central).

Recent Publications

2008 Bewitching Development: Witchcraft and the Reinvention of Development in Neoliberal Kenya (the University of Chicago Press, Practices of Meaning Series)

2006 Snake-Driven Development: Nature, Culture and Religious Conflict in Neo-liberal Kenya, Ethnography, Volume 7, No. 4: pp. 423-459.

2006 (with Jeffrey Mantz), Do Cell Phones Dream of Civl War?:  The Mystification of Production and the Consequences of Technology Fetishism in the Eastern Congo and Beyond, in Inclusion and Exclusion in the Global Arena, Max Kirsch, ed. (Routledge).

2005, Buying a Better Witch Doctor: Witchcraft, Globalization, and the Crisis of Sustainable Development in Taita, Kenya, American Ethnologist, 32, 1, 141-158

2004 [2001], Of Spirit Possession and Structural Adjustment Programs: Education, Government Downsizing, and their Enchantments in Neoliberal Kenya, in Producing African Futures, Brad Weiss, ed. (Brill).  Originally published in Journal of Religion in Africa, 31, 4, pp. 427-456

1998, Njama's Supper: The Consumption and Use of Literary Commodities by Mau Mau Insurgents in Colonial Kenya, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40, pp. 524-48.