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David NugentProfessor

Education

  • PhD, Columbia University, 1988

Research

Specializations

  • Sociocultural anthropology
  • Political economics
  • Agrarian society
  • State and nation building
  • Race and ethnicity
  • Knowledge and empire
  • Symbolism and power
  • Latin America

David Nugent has done field research in the eastern Canadian arctic on Inuit subsistence patterns, in east Africa on government-sponsored sorcery eradication, in the Peruvian Andes on state formation and underground political movements, and in the western U.S. on indigenous land and water rights. His areas of specialization include: political and economic anthropology; race, ethnicity and nationalism; Latin America; agrarian society; and the anthropology of the state.

He is the award-winning author and editor of several books, including Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885-1935 (Stanford University Press, 1997), Locating Capitalism in Time and Space: Global Restructurings, Politics and Identity (Stanford University Press, 2001), and (with Joan Vincent) A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (Blackwell Press; 2004, a Choice Magazine "Outstanding Academic Title of 2004"). He has also published widely in journals on issues related to the political, economic and historical anthropology of Latin America. During the 2001-2002 academic year Nugent was a visiting research fellow at the School of American Research (Santa Fe, NM), where he completed a book manuscript concerning the evolution of democracy and the public sphere in twentieth-century Peru. The volume is entitled, Alternative Democracies: Discipline, Dissent and State Formation in Northern Peru.