Rex

Hi I’m Alex Golub — Rex to my friends. I’m an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai’i Manoa here in Honolulu. I have two ethnographic projects. First, I have a long-standing interest in resource development in Papua New Guinea (i.e. mining and petroleum projects). I’m interested in the impact of mining on local peoples and vice versa — a project which means connecting anthropological theories of kinship to the political philosophical literature on recognition (trust me on this one). My second project is on notions of success, individualism, teamwork, and emotional control amongst American players of the massively multiplayer online video game World of Warcraft. These projects are connected by a shared (extremely abstract) concern with identity, a belief that it is productive to contrast different types of fieldsites, and the need — emerging from my PNG fieldwork — to confront what it means to be ‘white’ or ‘American’ if you want to make worthwhile comparisons between what ‘they’ do and what ‘we’ do.

My personal blog is  page is over at alex.golub.name. You can also check out my departmental profile at the UH website.

Here’s a picture of me:

I know, I know – it’s not cool to put a picture of yourself on your website unless it is really blurry and no one can see what you really look like. But this picture – for which Debby gets all the credit – just came out so well that I couldn’t resist. Taken outside my house in PNG during a welcome mumu for Debby (hence the bilas), I take a few moments out from the busy day of killing pigs and cooking sweet potato to double-check what exactly a communications-theoretic formulation of the lifeworld would entail. The Kings jersey indicates my alleigance to my home town. The marsupial fur, ferns, headband, plumage, facepaint, bow and arrows are all more or less what Porgerans wear when they are feeling nostalgic for the good old days.