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SARR Project Director

BRUCE KNAUFT (March, 2009)Contact information:
Bruce M. Knauft, SARR Project Director, bruce.knauft@emory.edu, 404-727-2736

(For Dr. Knauft's academic home page,
please click here)

Staff Contact:
Helen Simmons, Program Associate, helen.simmons@emory.edu: 404-727-4663

About the Director:
Bruce M. Knauft is Project Director of the States at Regional Risk Project (SARR) & Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. As the head of SARR, Dr. Knauft plans, administers, budgets, and orchestrates aspects of this project for Emory College.

Professor Knauft’s research combines politico-economic and cultural study across different world areas, historically, and in the present. His current work includes the geopolitical, economic, and cultural status of the U.S. vis-à-vis other nations and world areas, including in comparison with previous world powers and empires. He is also interested in "States at Risk" and the critical study of development and NGO intervention.

Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Dr. Knauft conducted his two years of doctoral research among a remote rainforest people of Papua New Guinea, the Gebusi, with whom he still maintains contact. During his twenty-one years at Emory, he has developed comparative interests and mentored student research across a range of world areas, topics, and disciplinary perspectives.

His publications have addressed issues of political economy and culture; modernity and marginality; politics and violence; and gender and sexuality. His seven books are:

Good Company and Violence: Sorcery and Social Action in a Lowland New Guinea Society
(University of California Press, 1985)

South Coast New Guinea Cultures: History, Comparison, Dialectic
(Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology
(Routledge Press, 1996)

From Primitive to Post-colonial in Melanesia and Anthropology
(University of Michigan Press, 1999)

Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before and After
(University of Chicago Press, 2002)

Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies
(Edited, Indiana University Press, 2002)

The Gebusi: Lives Transformed in a Rainforest World
(McGraw-Hill, 2nd edition, 2009).