Rena Lederman

Rena Lederman (Ph.D. Columbia 1982; associate professor) (social-cultural anthropology, gender, exchange, anthropology of science, anthropological history; disciplinary methods and ethics; Melanesia, U.S.) has done research in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. She is the author of What Gifts Engender and numerous journal articles and book chapters on the political economy of gift exchange, on inequality and leadership, on gender roles and ideologies and on historical representations and sociocultural change. She is currently completing a book entitled Anthropology Among the Disciplines that situates ethnography’s peculiar form of expertise comparatively among related kinds of knowledge; and planning another (co-authored with Maria Lepowsky) on gift/market entanglements. She edited and contributed to Anxious Borders between Work and Life in an Era of Bureaucratic Ethics Regulation (American Ethnologist Forum, November 2006) and is co-organizer of a 2007 New York Academy of Sciences symposium on institutional review boards. Her other ongoing research concerns problems in representing science in schools and lay media. Professor Lederman teaches courses on gender, Pacific Island cultures, economic anthropology, disciplinary methods, the anthropology of science, and a new course on The Uses of Deception in Magic and Science. E-mail: lederman@princeton.edu

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