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Thursday, 19 March 2009 |
 (Ph.D, Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 1999) Environmental anthropology, race, whiteness, landscape, conservation.
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As an environmental anthropologist, I study the relationship between, on the one hand, culture, politics, and political economy and, on the other hand, physical landscapes and their biotas. I straddle the boundary between anthropology and geography and, indeed, teach and advise graduate students in both disciplines. More precisely, I am interested in the ways in which groups of people seize upon particular landscapes and particular species, investing them with meaning and placing them at the center of power struggles. Such processes unfold continuously in many places. Yet, the colonial encounter – wherein outsiders literally seize landscapes – tends to sharpen these issues, rendering them more accessible to the ethnographer or historian. Hence, I have focused my scholarship thus far on Southern Africa and, within that region, mostly on Zimbabwe. British settlers colonized Zimbabwe in the 1890s and – I argue – set in motion political and cultural conflicts that persist to this day. Much of that conflict centers on policies of conservation and economic development, and my scholarship makes a contribution to such applied debates. Each of the two major projects described below – one accomplished, one underway, and one anticipated - expands the scholarship of environmental anthropology and seeks to reform the practice of environmentalism. Each project also recounts the human drama of people struggling and suffering with and for the land.
Link to my Biosketch
Link to my Book
Currently:
Associate Professor with tenure, Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 2007- (appointed as Assistant Professor in 2000).
Director, Center for African Studies, Rutgers University.
Graduate Faculty Member, Departments of Geography, Rutgers University.
Education
Ph.D, Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 1999.
Non-degree coursework, Biological Resources Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, 2004.
Master of Arts Degree, Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 1991.
Bachelor of Arts Degree, Political Science with African Studies, High Honors, Princeton University, 1989.
Selected Grants and Fellowships
Mellon Foundation, New Directions fellowship (with supplement), 2004-2010.
US Agency for International Development, principal investigator for Zimbabwe land reform portion of Broadening Access and Sustainable Input Market Systems (BASIS, a Collaborative Research Support Program administered by the Land Tenure Center, Univ. of Wisconsin), 2000-2003.
Social Science Research Council - MacArthur Foundation, Program on International Peace and Security, International/Non-Governmental Organization post-doctoral fellowship, 1999-2000.
Selected Publications
Hughes, D.M. 2006a. From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier. Seattle: University of Washington Press and Harare: Weaver Press. The Ford Foundation and Rutgers University have provided subventions.
Hughes, D.M. 2006b. “Hydrology of hope: farm dams, conservation, and whiteness in Zimbabwe.” American Ethnologist 33(2):269-87.
Hughes, D.M. 2006c. “Whites and water: how Euro-Africans made nature at Kariba Dam.” Journal of Southern African Studies 32(4):823-38.
Hughes, D.M. 2005. “Third nature: making space and time in the Great Limpopo conservation area.” Cultural Anthropology 20(2):157-84.
Hughes, D.M. 2001a. “Cadastral politics: the making of community-based resource management in Zimbabwe and Mozambique.” Development and Change 32:741-68.
Hughes, D.M. 2001b. “Rezoned for business: how eco-tourism unlocked black farmland in eastern Zimbabwe.” Journal of Agrarian Change 1(4):575-99.
Hughes, D.M. 2001c. “Water as a boundary: national parks, rivers, and the politics of demarcation in Chimanimani, Zimbabwe.” In Helen Ingram and Joachim Blatter, eds. Reflections on Water: New Approaches to Transboundary Conflicts and Cooperation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 267-94.
Hughes, D.M. 1999. "Refugees and squatters: immigration and territorial politics on the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border." Journal of Southern African Studies 25(4):533-52.
Selected Presentations
“Fear and loathing on Zimbabwe’s white highlands.” Presented to the “Political economies of displacement in Zimbabwe” conference, Wits Univ., Johannesburg, 9-11 June 2008.
“Requiem for the Zambezi Valley?: conservation under climate change,” White Oak Workshop, Wildlife Conservation Society, 4-7 June 2008.
“Playing the game: Zimbabwe’s white farmers under occupation.” Program on African Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 5 March 2008.
“From exploration to tourism: how conservationists appropriated the Zambezi Valley.” Presented to the Conservation and the Politics of Knowledge Workshop, University of Georgia, 6-8 November 2007.
“The politics of being white: land ownership and dispossession on Zimbabwe’s highveld.” Presented to the Political Economies of Displacement in post-2000 Zimbabwe workshop, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, 24-25 September 2007.
“Making Tonga marginal (again): literature, leisure, and exclusion at Lake Kariba.” Presented to “Forty years of working with marginalised communities in Zimbabwe” workshop in honor of Marshall Murphree, Vumba, Zimbabwe, 22-24 May 2007.
“White identity and implicated nature: the making of conservation in highland Africa,” Agrarian Studies Program, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 6 October 2006.
“Governance without guarantees: rights, markets, and conservation in Zimbabwe,” World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, 12 September 2006.
“’The native question’ from colonialism to Campfire,” World Wide Fund for Nature, Harare, 17 May 2006.
“’Water wilderness’: the redemption of environmental ruin at Lake Kariba, Zimbabwe,” East African Wildlife Society, Nairobi, Kenya, 11 May 2006.
“Hydrology of hope: farm dams, conservation, and whiteness in Zimbabwe.” Association of American Geographers annual meeting, Chicago, 7-11 March 2006.
Selected External Service
IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy (Working Groups on Collaborative Management and Sustainable Livelihoods), 2003-
Peer Reviewer, Diagnostic Research Project on Community Based Natural Resources Management, University of Natal, South Africa, 2003-2004.
Peer Reviewer, Institutions and Governance Program, World Resources Institute, Washington, D.C., 2000-2002. |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 29 May 2009 )
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