______________________
University
of Kentucky
Department of Anthropology
211 Lafferty Hall
Lexington, KY 40506
Phone: 859-257-2710
Fax: 859-323-1959
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Last update: 8/2004
 |
Lisa Cliggett |
- AB Connecticut College, 1987
- PhD Anthropology, Indiana University 1997
- Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Anthropological Demography, University of Pennsylvania, Population Studies Center 1997-1998
My passion for anthropology began when I traveled to Mexico as a teenager, and managed to escape the manicured confines of tourist hotels and sites. I walked the small passageways in the local people's market and residential neighborhoods, and felt that I had slipped through a secret doorway into a more complicated and compelling world than what tour operators present to American travelers. From then on I sought to know more about how local people throughout the world experience their day-to-day lives; particularly how they manage their lives in contexts of extreme social and economic differentiation, and increasing global exchange.
Since that early
passion I have pursued research on a range of topics, including: child
fostering, support systems for the elderly, social and economic factors
in migration decision making, impacts of education on family and community,
gender and agricultural change, and most recently, links between frontier
land settlement and ecological change. The common thread through all of
these issues is a concern for practical and pragmatic questions relating
social and cultural change to political-economic structures at local,
regional, national and international levels. These research interests
draw on anthropological theories of household economy, ecology and culture,
social organization, political economy, and social demography, as well
as theoretical perspectives that emerge from multidisciplinary work linking
comparative economics, political science, development and environmental
studies, geography, sociology, demography, and gerontology.
Since 1992 I have
conducted fieldwork in both rural and urban areas of Zambia, Central Africa.
My current research interests include an examination of migration, agriculture
and environmental change in national park buffer zones. During the summer
of 2001 I took three undergraduate anthropology students from the University
of Kentucky to Zambia with me to help collect data, and also to provide
an ethnographic "field school" for the students. The National
Science Foundation (NSF) recently funded a proposal for continued research
in this frontier region. The project is a collaboration with two geographers
specializing in environmental change, GIS and remote sensing (Jon Unruh,
Indiana University; Rod Hay, Cal State Dominguez Hills), and will examine
migrants' land tenure insecurity in relation to deforestation in a frontier
farming region bordering Africa's largest national park - Kafue National
Park - in central Zambia.
In addition to this
new research agenda, I am one of three new members of the longitudinal
Gwembe Tonga Research Project (GTRP), started by Elizabeth Colson and
Thayer Scudder in 1956. This "next generation" of the GTRP increasingly
manages, and determines the direction of this multidisciplinary project,
which examines cultural continuity and change in all of its forms and
facets. We are currently developing proposals to computerize and manage
the fifty years of ethnographic and qualitative Gwembe Tonga data, which
will be submitted to a number of foundations including Wenner Gren and
NEH. Once computerized, this ethnographic resource will be linked to the
demographic database which was systematized under an NSF grant from 1995-1998.
Prior to Zambia and
my work with the GTRP, I worked on a medical anthropology project in Haiti
focusing on maternal - child health care and community participation.
Along with my interests in Zambia and African studies, I remain concerned
and passionate about Haiti and the Caribbean.
I teach courses across
these many interests and regions, and encourage my students to become
creative, competent and professional social scientists, capable of working
effectively in both academic and applied settings.
Selected Publications:
- 2003 "Gift-remitting and Alliance Building in Zambian Modernity:
Old Answers to Modern Problems." American Anthropologist.
- 2003 "Male Wealth and Claims to Motherhood: Gendered Resource
Access and Intergenerational Relations in the Gwembe Valley, Zambia."
In Gender at Work in Economic Life, SEA volume 20. Gracia Clark, editor.
Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press
- 2002 Multi-Generations and Multi-Disciplines: Inheriting Fifty Years
of Gwembe Tonga Research. In Chronicling Cultures: Long-Term Field Research
in Anthropology. Robert Van Kemper, Anya Royce, editors. Walnut Creek:
Alta Mira Press. Pp. 239-251.
- 2001 "Gender, Subsistence, and Residential Arrangements for the
Elderly in the Gwembe Valley, Zambia." Journal of Cross Cultural
Gerontology. 16(4):309-332.
- "Carrying Capacity's New Guise: Folk Models in Anthropology
and the Longitudinal Study of Environmental Change." Africa Today
48(1):3-20.
- 2000 "Social Components of Migration: Experiences from Southern
Province, Zambia." Human Organization. 59(1):125-135.
Current
Writing Project:
- Grains from Grass: aging and vulnerability in rural Africa. Book Manuscript