James H. Smith
Associate Professor
PhD University of Chicago, 2002
Office Hours for Spring Quarter 2013, Monday 10AM-12PM
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, California 95616, USA
Fax: (530) 752-8885
Education:
- 2002, PhD, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
- MA, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
- BA, Anthropology and Social Thought/Political Economy, 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).
Biography:
Research Interests
"Development" and Vernacular Development Narratives and Practices; Artisanal Mining and Resource Extraction; State Transformation and Conflict/War; Religion, ritual and the occult; East and Central Africa
Recent Publications
2011 Tantalus in the Digital Age: Coltan ore, temporal dispossession, and "movement" in the Eastern DR Congo. American Ethnologist, Volume 38, Number 1, pp. 17-35
2011 Displacing the State: Religion and Conflict in Neoliberal Africa (editor, with Rosalind Hackett), University of Notre Dame Press.
2011 Religious Dimensions of Conflict and Peace in Neoliberal Africa: An Introduction (introduction to Displacing the State, University of Notre Dame Press).
2011 Making Peace with the Devil: The Political Life of Devil Worship Rumors in Kenya (in Displacing the State, University of Notre Dame Press).
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.
