Senate Faculty

Research Interests

Racial formation, diaspora, nationalism, transnationalism, culture and power; Latin America, African diaspora

Biography, Education and Training

Mark Anderson is a cultural anthropologist specializing in race and ethnicity, transnationalism, the African diaspora, tourism, Latin America, and the history of anthropology. His most recent book is From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology, a history of U.S. cultural anthropological thought on race and racism from the 1920s to the early 1970s.  His earlier book Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras examines the politics of race and culture among the Garifuna in Honduras to explore the relationships between multiculturalism, consumption, and neoliberalism in the Americas. It demonstrates the mutual entanglements between indigeneity and blackness and between diasporic affiliations and nativist attachments, analyzing the overlapping, ambivalent and unstable modes of identification through people represent themselves and negotiate oppression. Mark Anderson received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and was a Harper postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.

Selected Publications

• From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2019.https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=29414
• Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009
• "Notes on Tourism, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Cultural Value in Honduras", Jennifer Burrell and Ellen Moodie, Central America in the New Millenium, New York: Berghan Books, forthcoming
• "Garifuna Activism and the Corporatist Honduran State since the 2009 Coup", Jean Rahier, Black Social Movements in Latin America: From Monocultural Mestizaje to Multiculturalism, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming
• "The Complicated Career of Hugh Smythe . . . Anthropologist and Ambassador: The Early Years, 1940-1950", Transforming Anthropology 16(2), 128-146, 2008
• "When Afro Becomes (like) Indigenous: Garifuna and Afro-Indigenous Politics in Honduras", Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 12(2), 384-413, 2007
• "Ruth Benedict, Boasian Anthropology, and the Problem of the Colour Line" History and Anthropology 25(3), 2014

Teaching Interests

Race and Ethnicity; Capitalism, Consumption and Value; Latin America; The African Diaspora; Social and Cultural Theory; Transnationalism and Diaspora