Dr Casey High

Staff Details

Casey High’s research focuses on violence, history and indigenous political movements in Latin America. His ongoing fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon combines historical and ethnographic perspectives on violence and the transformation of inter-ethnic relations in Waorani communities. His research interests also include language, indigenous rights and the interface between Amazonian cosmology and development. He is co-editor of two books that engage key aspects of contemporary anthropological theory and practice. These include How Do We Know? Evidence, ethnography, and the making of anthropological knowledge (2008) and Anthropology of Ignorance: Ethnographic Perspectives (2012). He is currently working on a monograph relating indigenous Amazonian understandings of history to representations of Amazonian violence in colonial history, missionary texts and contemporary cinema. He joined the department of anthropology at Goldsmiths in 2006 after completing his PhD in anthropology at the London School of Economics.

Teaching

Casey High teaches the Anthropology of Violence course.

Areas of supervision

Dr. High is currently interested in supervising doctoral students working on a wide range of topics in Latin America including political anthropology, development, violence and memory, and Amazonian societies.

Current MPhil/PhD students supervised:

• Jasmin Immonen
• Charlotte Livingston, Youth, Police Occupation, and Embodying New Forms of Citizenship
• William Tantam

Research interests

Casey High’s research is based on long-term fieldwork with Waorani communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where he has been working since 1997. His doctoral fieldwork 2002-2004 looked specifically at the transformation of inter-ethnic relations in the context of oil development and logging on indigenous lands, as well as emerging role of indigenous political organizations. His research and publications also examine the gendered and generational aspects of violence and memory in the context urban migration. This research forms the basis of his forthcoming monograph, entitled, Victims and Warriors: Violence, History and Memory in Amazonia.

Dr. High’s is also interested in the place of evidence in anthropological epistemologies and is co-editor of the book How Do We Know? Evidence, ethnography, and the making of anthropological knowledge (2008). The volume examines the methodological and theoretical implications of emerging forms of ethnographic evidence ranging from historical texts and visual media to emotions and music. He is also co-editor of a second book, Anthropology of Ignorance: Ethnographic Perspectives (2012), which challenges the conventional anthropological focus on knowledge and its production by considering ethnographic contexts in which the lack of knowledge is expressed as a cultural value.

In 2008-2009 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Université Paris X – Nanterre, where he was involved in a multidisciplinary group working on aspects of agentivity in Amerindian languages and cosmology. He also received an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2009-2010) for a new research project examining social memory and masculinity in the context of urban political engagement in Ecuador.

Grants and Awards

Dr. High recently received a research grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) at SOAS for a three-year interdisciplinary project (2010-2013) to document the Waorani language. The project involves collaborating with linguists and indigenous people in Ecuador to document this indigenous Amazonian language through video recordings, transcription and translation.

Selected publications

Books

2012. Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach. With J. Mair and A. Kelly, eds. Palgrave Macmillan (Culture, Mind and Society Series).

2008. How Do We Know? Evidence, Ethnography and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge. With L. Chua and T. Lau, eds. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Journal Articles

2012. Between Friends and Enemies: The Dynamics of Inter-Ethnic Relations in Amazonian Ecuador. With E. Reeve. Ethnohistory. 59(1): 141-162.

2010. Warriors, Hunters, and Bruce Lee: Gendered Agency and the Transformation of Amazonian Masculinity. American Ethnologist. 37(4) 753-770.

2009. Remembering the ‘Auca’: Violence and Generational Memory in Amazonian Ecuador. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. (N.S.) 15: 719-736.

2009. Victims and Martyrs: Converging Histories of Violence in Amazonian Anthropology and U.S. Cinema. Anthropology and Humanism. 34(1):41-50.

2007. Indigenous Organizations, Oil Development, and the Politics of Egalitarianism. Cambridge Anthropology. 26(2): 34-46.

Book Chapters

(in press) Shamans, Animals, and Enemies: Locating the Human and Non-Human in an Amazonian Cosmos of Alterity. In Personhood in the Shamanic Ecologies of Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia. M. Brightman, V. Grotti and O. Ulturgasheva , eds. Oxford: Berghahn. Pp. 130-135.

2012. Between Knowing and Being: Ignorance in Anthropology and Amazonian Shamanism. In Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach. J. Mair, C. High and A. Kelly, eds. Palgrave Macmillan.

2012. Making Ignorance an Ethnographic Object. With J. Mair and A. Kelly. In Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach. Palgrave Macmillan.

2008. Introduction: Questions of Evidence. With L. Chua and T. Lau. In How Do We Know? Evidence, Ethnography and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge. Pp. 1-19.

2008. End of the Spear: Re-imagining Amazonian History and Ethnography through Film. In How Do We Know? Evidence, Ethnography and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge. Pp. 76-96.

Review Articles

2010. Agency and Anthropology. Review article in Ateliers du laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative (LESC). No. 34.

Book Reviews

2011. A Walk to the River in Amazonia: Ordinary Reality for the Mehinaku Indians (Carla Stang), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Vol. 17(1): 178-182.

2009. Napo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia (Norman E. Whitten and Dorothea S. Whitten), Journal of Latin American Studies. 41(1): 197-198.

2007. Seeing and Being Seen: The Q’eqchi’ Maya of Livingston, Guatemala and Beyond (Hilary E. Kahn). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Vol. 13(4): 1059-1060.