Susan Carol Rogers
Associate Professor of AnthropologyPh.D. 1979, Northwestern, M.S. 1983, Illinois, M.A. 1973, Northwestern, B.A. 1972, Brown.
Office Address: Rufus D. Smith Hall 25 Waverly Place New York, NY 10003
Email:
Phone: 212-998-8563
Fax: 212-995-4014
Areas of Research/Interest
Sociocultural anthropology; French society and culture; rural development; tourism; Europeanist ethnography and history.
Publications
"Which heritage? Nature, culture, and identity in French rural tourism." French Historical Studies 25, no. 3. 2002.
"Anthropology in France." Annual Review of Anthropology 30. 2001. 481-504.
Shaping Modern Times in Rural France: The Transformation and Reproduction of an Aveyronnais Community. Princeton University Press. 1991.
"Good to think: The 'peasant' in contemporary France." Anthropological Quarterly 60, no. 2. 1987. 56-63.
Paysans, Femmes, et Citoyens: Luttes pour le Pouvoir dans un Village Lorrain. (Peasants, Women, and Citizens: Power in a Village of Lorraine), with C. Karnoouh and H. Lamarche. Actes Sud. 1980.
"Female forms of power and the myth of male dominance: a model of female/male interaction in peasant society." American Ethnologist 2, no. 4. 1975. 727-56.
Current News / Projects
Updated July 2010
I am hoping that this year will see the happy conclusion of a project I launched awhile ago with a French colleague. After many years of comparing notes about the particular challenges and pleasures we had experienced as foreign ethnographers of familiar places (France in my case, US in hers), we brought a small group of American anthropologists specializing in France together with several French anthropologists having fieldwork experience in the US to explore some of these issues more systematically. Within this group, we stand in reciprocal relationships with each other as both native subjects and foreign experts, hold nationalities carrying roughly equivalent amounts of geo-political power and academic legitimacy, and conduct research in settings that are readily accessible and familiar to our audiences. In those ways, our ethnographic positions are quite odd with respect to classical anthropology, but perhaps bound to become increasingly common in the 21st century. Over the past few years, we have held several meetings (at NYU in Paris and Middlebury College), giving us the opportunity to discuss our fieldwork experience in and ethnographic analyses about each other’s societies, yielding in turn many novel (and empirically well-grounded) insights about the production of anthropological knowledge. Several French publishers have been interested in a French version of the edited volume drawn from this experiment, and we are currently finalizing a contract with one of them. We are aiming for a subsequent English-language version.
In my teaching too, I continue to be interested in the ways that new or unconventional styles of anthropology can reproduce, build upon or productively depart from classical modes. My courses on the History of Anthropology—this year in both graduate and undergraduate versions--is largely driven by this interest, as is my course on Family and Kinship. My fourth course for the year, on the ethnography of Europe, is one I always especially enjoy: it gives me a chance to closely read several new ethnographies, as well as providing the challenge of introducing undergraduates to anthropological ways of thinking about a part of the world that most of them know by other routes.
