Dr Casey High
Position held:
Lecturer
Phone:
+44 (0)20 7078 5046
Fax:
+44 (0)20 7919 7813
Email:
c.high (@gold.ac.uk)
Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, London, SE14 6NW
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 (in press). 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
Dr Casey High convenes the BA Anthropology programme
He teaches on the following courses:
- Introduction to Social Anthropology
- Ethnography of Lowland South America
- Anthropology of Violence
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.
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 (in press), 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.
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
(forthcoming) Anthropology of Ignorance and Unknowing. 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.
Articles
(forthcoming). Between Knowing and Being: Ignorance in Anthropology and Amazonian Shamanism. In Anthropology of Ignorance and Unknowing. J. Mair, C. High and A. Kelly, eds. Palgrave Macmillan.
(forthcoming) Making Ignorance an Ethnographic Object. With J. Mair and A. Kelly. In Anthropology of Ignorance and Unknowing. Palgrave Macmillan.
(forthcoming) Between Friends and Enemies: The Dynamics of Inter-Ethnic Relations in Amazonian Ecuador. With E. Reeve. Ethnohistory.
(forthcoming) 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.
2010. Warriors, Hunters, and Bruce Lee: Gendered Agency and the Transformation of Amazonian Masculinity. American Ethnologist. 37(4).
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.
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.
2007. Indigenous Organizations, Oil Development, and the Politics of Egalitarianism. Cambridge Anthropology. 26(2): 34-46.
Review Articles and 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.
2010. Agency and Anthropology. Review article in Ateliers du laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative (LESC). No. 34.
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.