Training
Undergraduate Work Brown University’s Environmental Studies and Modern Culture and Media communities sparked my work on symbol, social power and environmental outcomes. My AB honors thesis with Sanda Golopentia Eretescu in Literature and Society re-translated French novelist Marguerite Duras’s descriptions of race, class, and gender, documenting how previous translations and marketing of her work for North American audiences focused on “steamy tropical romance” rather than Duras’s critiques of French colonial and postcolonial governance in Indochina, and her explorations of gendered aspects of Chinese economic dominance there.
Decolonizing Education in Equatorial Africa(s) I served in the U.S. Peace Corps for three years in the Central African Republic, or CAR. At that time CAR was home to one of France’s last postcolonial military bases, close to the village where I was posted, even as Asian investments in infrastructure were ramping up and the dream of “independence” seemed ever more ephemeral to many Central Africans. Estienne Goyemidé, CAR’s Minister of Education, shared with me in person and through his novels his sense of these challenges. Through their pedagogies and personal stories, language instructors in Eastern Zaire at ISP Bukavu (where I trained for a few months before arriving in CAR) also shared their perspectives on postcolonial equatorial African education and politics.
Dissertation work: Forest Conservation and Concessionary Politics I wanted to keep learning with and about CAR when I went to graduate school. Anthropologist Angelique Haugerud and historian Robert Harms taught me about political, property and cultural forms across Eastern and Equatorial African settings. I learned field ecology methods that respect indigenous environmental knowledges from Harold Conklin, reflexivity and theories of power and self in Africanist writing with Eric Worby, ecological methods and navigation across subfields, disciplines and institutions with Alison Richard. Richard and Haugerud co-advised me, revealing the power of collaborative, cross sub-field mentorship.
Postdoc: Geopolitics of Risk, Resilience and Representations of Africa(s) The late Gus Ranis at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies (now MacMillan Center) supported me as a postdoc developing the Sangha River Network or SRN for advocates, policy makers, and scientific researchers in the western Congo Basin. We shaped priorities for funds from USAID for forest conservation there. Georges Dupré at the Institut de la Recherche pour le Développement in France (and Marie Claude Dupré at CNRS) supported my postdoc building SRN, linking field and lab based scientific knowledges in French, English and African languages. Philippe Ryfman at Université Paris 1 (Sorbonne) offered me, as one of the few anglophone scholars of CAR, a teaching partnership with one of the few francophone scholars of Zimbabwe, Estienne Rodary. We created graduate courses combining French and English language theory on international development at the Sorbonne. Estienne also became a Postdoc at Yale, so that we could offer our course transatlantically. Then Samuel Huntington and his team at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies offered me a two year fellowship, hosting my collaborative workshops to connect French, African and North American scholars of infectious disease and forest governance.
Mentorship
Pregrad The late Pierre Vidal, and archeologist, historian and ethnographer, wrote about coming of age rituals within Gbaya Kara worlds. His reverence for their monotheistic and nature-centered religious practices and his sustained fascination with the ancient megaliths on Gbaya territories marked commonality and variation in human experiences of the social, and the sacred. His wife Marie, Gbaya Kara herself, managed their homes in Bouar, Bangui, and a field camp on the Ouaham river where relatives would process smoked caterpillars collected for food (even as Vidal sat nearby, slicing his apples and camembert, flown in on the Transall C-160 military flights to and around CAR from France in those days). Pierre and Marie’s lives contrasted with the lives of other French expatriates in CAR, many of whom were directly involved with the military, or with increasingly militarized anti poaching. Seconded to the University of Bangui, Pierre wrote my reference letters for Yale, mailed on a three year out-of-date application form via diplomatic pouch. He set me on this academic path; I miss both him and Marie, and too many of their children, also gone too soon, so much.
One of Vidal’s archeology students, Henri Zana–now a PhD candidate at University of Gand in Belgium–worked with me on my PhD field research. We shared ideas and methods that shaped our respective careers. The circumstances of his subsequent predoctoral training in Nanterre (versus my postdoc at the Sorbonne) reveal much about our world’s struggle with elitist and predatory educational and research practices. His fieldwork in conflict zones of CAR, briefly described here, put Henri and his data in danger far too often. Underfunded public education in CAR delays the academic progress of the university’s instructors due to mandatory civil service as faculty at the University of Bangui. This impeded his progress to the PhD, despite strong predoctoral publications with Anna Roosevelt who mentored both him and me.
Despite these obstacles, his investigations with colleagues at the University Center for Documentation on the History and Archeology of Central Africa or CURDHACA ensure that even archeological finds unearthed at gunpoint in militia-based mining systems can be catalogued and included in the wider human struggle to understand cultural, economic and ecological formations over time in equatorial central Africa (The Dawn of Everything, indeed). His older daughter has come to live with me and my family during times of acute insecurity and civil conflict, and Henri and I have remained friends and collaborators despite these glaring asymmetries in our respective trajectories.
Early career mentors John Galaty and Colin Scott catalyzed my teaching career, offering me my first job as Assistant Professor at McGill. They each modeled life in dual academic career households and families, welcoming me into kitchens and conferences alike where strong team work shines. During my 2018 sabbatical leave I returned to Montreal to spend time at the Center for Indigenous Conservation and Development Alternatives (or CICADA) and Center for Society, Technology and Development (StandD) at McGill University’s Department of Anthropology.
Midcareer mentorship from the late Jane Guyer shaped my collaborations with Damani Partridge and Marina Welker on corporate social forms. Our workshop was sponsored by an unprecedented collaboration between the Wenner Gren Foundation and the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. Jane was one of the most lucid and intricately accountable scholarly voices in equatorial Africanist anthropology, and also invited a wide and productive range of collaborations. I miss her so much.
Another such mentor is Serge Bahuchet, formerly at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Serge welcomed me as a visiting faculty member, sharing perspectives on the French anthropological academy with its emphasis on theory (his own veneration of vernacular cultural ecological knowledges notwithstanding). Serge and his lab hosted visitors from Africa, the US and Asia for the Central Africa Foresty Institution (CAFI) project both for workshops at the EcoAnthropology and Ethnobiology Lab, CNRS, and Museum National d’Histoire Naturel Paris and for and for an elegant closing conference at the Musee de l’Homme.
Community
Sustainability Collaborations Jesse Njoka, teaching at University of Nairobi’s Agriculture and Veterinary College on dryland range ecology is a generous collaborator (thanks to UMich grad Margaret Kinnaird for connecting me). Njoka enabled workshops with my colleagues Joe Eisenberg and Ella August on publication support for junior faculty at U Nairobi, and facilitated exchange among veterinary and biomedical sciences, land and resource management research, and policy and legal questions around rangeland for my projects with Joe and Johannes Foufopoulos.
Dr. Emile Mbot of Universite Omar Bongo Libreville Gabon and Patrick Mickala of Science and Tech University of Masuku Gabon, in Franceville have guided me and my UM colleagues in Gabon (thanks to Chemical Engineer Johannes Schwank and Howard University’s Jean Jacques Taty for connecting me). These colleagues hosted us in their homes and on their campuses for collaborative workshops toward a Research Institute for Sustainability Education at the historic Hôpital Albert Schweitzer in Gabon.
My colleague Adelaide Nieguitsila further developed that project, coming to UM to work with myself and Civil Engineer Lut Raskin. Raskin’s mentorship and collaborative practice creates novel forms of trust and collaboration with colleagues in our local and regional water utilities that have enabled us to host teams of Gabonese researchers and educators and their counterparts in the national drinking water utility, to visit drinking water operations in Detroit, Ann Arobr, and rural areas in Michigan in ways that have undergirded our wider EPA funded work across many utilities in the US at this time in the Co-DOWN consortium.
The Rich Earth Institute (thanks to Civil Engineer Nancy Love for connecting me) and particularly the anthropologist Tatiana Schreiber, have taught me much about consultative ethnographic grounding for implementing technological transitions in US based agricultural and water management systems.
Environmental Justice Communities Colleagues at the Association of Law, Property, and Society (gratitude to Hari Osofsky for connecting me) have enabled me to serve and lead that organization, albeit as an anthropologist, not a legal scholar. They are wonderful at refining thought, and turning it to action that moves legal and policy systems toward more equitable outcomes. At the same time they are great at building more inclusive and diverse communities of legal scholarship, in part by founding and maintaining an open journal for our scholarly community, but also through our conferences-as-active-learning. These have ranged from neighborhoods in Detroit to indigenous sweat lodges, casinos and board rooms, from the political history of the troubles in Belfast, Ireland, to governance of forest preserves in the heart of England.
At UM both Bunyan Bryant and Dorceta Taylor offered intellectual and interpersonal support they offered acknowledged the stresses of academic work toward tenure, and of work in communities toward environmental justice. From potluck dinners to partnerships for mentoring doctoral students, from pioneering the first Graduate Certificate Program in Environmental Justice, to sharing professional insights for work life balance, they were, along with Paul Mohai, the pillars of my early career in Ann Arbor. Kyle Powys Whyte, a current colleague, has followed in the footsteps of Bryant, as one of the kindest collaborators and most community centered scholars and teachers I have known. His interpersonal and institutional practices make any meeting, cohort, program, or project feel cared for, and consequential. In such persistent micropractices of consultation are the seeds of what Whyte calls for in his writing against crisis epistemologies: wider ranging, transformative “coordination” that is sustainable, and sustaining.