Alex Golub

Assistant Professor

Background
General Interests
Current Research
Recent Publications

Background: I am a Jewish intellectual from northern California. I received a BA in anthropology from Reed College (1995), and my MA (1997) and Ph.D. (2006) from the University of Chicago. My dissertation, "Making The Ipili Feasible: Imagining 'Local' and 'Global' Actors at The Porgera Gold Mine, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea," was based on two years of fieldwork. Porgera is home to one of the largest gold mines in the world, and the Ipili are among the most successful indigenous groups to date in obtaining concessions from the government and mining companies. How, I asked, have they managed this success? In the dissertation I use a close ethnographic analysis of high-stakes negotiations between Ipili and mining representatives as a leaping off point for a broader consideration of indigenous identity, the relations between extractive industry and indigenous people in Papua New Guinea more generally, and the interaction of 'global' and 'local' forces.The goal of the dissertation was to tie a semiotic account of the creation of representations of indigenous people to a political-economic account of power politics within a contemporary Pacific nation.

While writing up my dissertation I caught the tail end of the Internet boom and worked first as a technician and then as a manager of computer support services in three of the four divisions of the University of Chicago, including academic units such as the James Franke and Enrico Fermi institutes. As a result I have an on-going interest in 'digital genres' (computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction) particularly as they relate to open source software and open access scholarship, including bringing anthropology to a popular audience.

In general I am a fox and not a hedgehog -- I'm broadly interested in a variety of topics.

General Interests:

Papua New Guinea, Melanesia, and the Pacific. Digital genres and semiotic technologies. Identity. Kinship. The State. Property. Political theory. Historical anthropology. History of anthropology.

Current Research:

My undergraduate work on Papua New Guinea focused on 'first contact' in the highlands, and I continue to think about and write on the history of Papua New Guinea's colonial administration and its impact on post-independence law and policy. My dissertation focused on the way 'the Ipili' as an ethnic group came to be recognized by the state and corporations in Papua New Guinea, and I continue to study the Porgera gold mine as it moves towards closure. I am also interested in understanding how individual actors came to be recognized as 'the state' and 'the company' by the Ipili -- hence I am interested in the constitution not only 'indigenous people' but the way cosmopolitans come to represent 'global forces'. As a result I am interested in broadening my own project to include an ethnography of policy elites in both Papua New Guinea and Australia and their formulation of 'expert knowledge' about Papua New Guinea -- including anthropology's involvement in this process.

At a theoretical level, this interest in how indigenous people make claims against the state involves working the interface between law, political theories of recognition and identity, and the literature on kinship and land tenure. Comparatively, it means examining how claims for land and identity have been articulated in countries throughout the world. I am particularly interested in comparing Papua New Guinea with other commonwealth countries, as well as with the United states.

I am currently serving as a member of the American Anthropological Association's AnthroSource Steering Committee. As a result I am interested in examining commons-based knowledge production and developing open source tools to facilitate scholarly communication. I have a more general interest in computer-mediated communication and intellectual property. I am tentatively exploring the possibility of a project on massively multiplayer role playing games in East Asia.

Finally, I am interested in making anthropology more 'open' by writing about it in non-academic fora. Currently I am a founder of the anthropology blog savageminds.org and write a monthly column for insidehighered.com about life on the tenure track.

Recent Publications:

Latest texts at http://alex.golub.name/log/things-ive-written/

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