Please Welcome Guest Blogger Rena Lederman

Savage Minds is very pleased to welcome Rena Lederman as a guest blogger for a spell. Rena has taught at Princeton University for over 20 years. Here is an introductory paragraph:

Lederman has done fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and the US. Her PNG fieldwork resulted in an ethnography, What Gifts Engender: Social Relations and Politics in Mendi, Highland Papua New Guinea, and numerous journal articles and book chapters on the exchange, inequality and leadership, gender roles and ideologies, historical representations, and socio-cultural transformations. More recently, her research has concerned the anthropology of knowledge practices and their ethical underpinnings. She edited and contributed to Anxious Borders between Work and Life in an Era of Bureaucratic Ethics Regulation (American Ethnologist Forum, November 2006)—on the politics of “human subjects” research oversight—and is currently completing a book entitled Anthropology Among the Disciplines that situates ethnography’s peculiar form of expertise comparatively among related kinds of knowledge (like sociology, social psychology, history and journalism). Spinning-off the work on research ethics, she recently designed a new course on The Uses of Deception in Magic and Science. Her other ongoing research concerns the politics of expertise, particularly the challenge of representing science in schools and popular media.

Rena will be initiating a discussion of, among other things, current thinking on the politics of IRB oversight of ethnographic research. This has been a hot topic here at SM on several previous occasions, and I hope that everyone will join me in avidly engaging Rena’s current thinking on this important topic.

I add that Rena was my principal dissertation adviser. I am pleased to be able to welcome her to SM as a trusted mentor, colleague, and friend.

Strong is Thomas Strong, lecturer in the department of anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has previously held teaching and/or research posts at the University of Helsinki, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, and (oddly enough) the American Academy of Ophthalmology. His publications include essays on the symbolism of blood and body in the U.S. and elsewhere, new cross-disciplinary work on kinship, and ideas of culture loss and bodily detumescence amongst the Dano-speakers of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands province. His on-going research in PNG concerns transformations in sociality, gender relations, and personhood following the mid-twentieth-century repudiation of the traditional men's cult in the upper Asaro valley. His other interests include 'brand' as an ethnographic and analytic concept, HIV/AIDS (especially in the U.S. gay male community), and celebrity/fame.