Princeton University

Professor

Director of Graduate Studies  

Ph.D. Columbia University, 1982

interests
social-cultural anthropology; gender, exchange, historical consciousness; comparison and translation, anthropology of knowledges, comparative disciplinary methods and ethics; Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), Melanesia, United States

short bio
Rena Lederman is a cultural anthropologist who has done fieldwork in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the political economy of gift exchange, on inequality and leadership, on gender roles and ideologies, and on historical consciousness and change.  She is author of What Gifts Engender and several journal articles and chapters on Melanesian research.  She is also editor of a 2006 American Ethnologist Forum on the politics of "human subjects" research oversight (e.g., Institutional Review Boards), Anxious Borders Between Work and Life in a Time of Bureaucratic Ethics Regulation.  She is currently completing a book on disciplinarity in and around anthropology entitled Anthropology Among the Disciplines. Her other ongoing research concerns research ethics across the disciplines; and the challenge of translating science and other expert knowledges in popular media. Professor Lederman teaches courses on gender, Pacific Island cultures, economic anthropology, disciplinary methods and ethics, and on the uses of deception in performance magic ("conjuring") and science (e.g., biomedicine, psychology, and ethnography). 

Fall 2009

The Ethnographer's Craft (ANT 301) :  One of the Anthropology Department's three core courses for undergraduate majors, ANT 301 provides hands-on experience doing field research. 

Disciplinary Practices (ANT 541):  This year, the Anthropology Department's graduate Co-Seminar focuses on field research methods.  It takes a practicum approach and also works to situate the anthropological style of fieldwork comparatively in relation to research styles in neighboring disciplines.

Spring 2009

The Uses of Deception (ANT 360):  This course surveys the uses of deception -- or as conjurors call it, "misdirection" -- in everyday life, in American popular culture (from PT Barnum through Alan Funt's Candid Camera to contemporary reality TV), and performance magic, among other things.  That survey launches us into an exploration of the uses of misdirection (as an ethically acceptable practice that can go bad) in the sciences of the human:  biomedicine, experimental psychology, sociology, and sociocultural anthropology. 

Anthropological Ethics and the Anthropology of Ethics (ANT 570):  Graduate seminar on the history and politics of ethics discourse in anthropology, and on professional ethics as an productive object for ethnographic and comparative study.  While course readings focus on the ethics of academic knowledge production -- with an emphasis on controversy -- not just in anthropology but also in psychology, sociology, and historiography, we also consider journalism and the responses and interests of non-academic publics.  Student research may range more widely.