Position
Professor;
Office Phone
(609) 258-5534
Email
lederman@princeton.edu
Office
127 Aaron Burr Hall
Office Hours
Thursday: 3:00 pm-4:00 pm
Also by appointment
Degrees
Ph.D. Columbia University, 1982
Bio/Description
Interests
Relationality, agency, expertise, and ethics; the politics of "method" in ethnography, disciplinary knowledges as moral orders (esp. historiography, sociology, psychology, anthropology); past and future of sciences/humanities tensions in popular and academic discourse; bureaucratic and regulatory policies and practices, administrative law and democracy; gendered/sexed experience, meanings, and ideologies; economic experience as culture: exchange, consumption, property, open access/digital commons. Oceania, US.
Short Bio
Professor Lederman’s recent interests have included relationality, expertise, and ethics; the politics of “method” in human sciences (particularly anthropology); disciplinary knowledges as “moral orders”; science/humanities tensions in popular and academic discourse; and bureaucratic and regulatory policies and practices. She has longstanding interests in gendered/sexed experiences and meanings and in economic experience as culture (in particular, tensions among market and non-market exchange, consumption, and property forms).???
Her first fieldwork in highland Papua New Guinea (PNG) concerned gift exchange relations, inequality and leadership, gender roles and ideologies, historical consciousness, and socioeconomic change. That research resulted in What Gifts Engender (Cambridge U Press, 1986)?and several journal articles and book chapters, most recently “The Anthropology of the Big Man” (in The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2nd Edition), 2015).
Her recent US-based field, archival, and e-mediated research concerns the comparative anthropology of knowledge practices and research ethics across human science disciplines. ?While she hadn’t planned it to have policy relevance, this work has implications for federal regulations concerning human research ethics. In controversies concerning ethics policy and practice, anthropology’s foundational means for understanding human lives – ethnographic fieldwork – needs informed advocacy.? Toward that end, she edited a 2006?American Ethnologist?Forum on the politics of "human subjects" research oversight (e.g., IRBs),?Anxious Borders between Work and Life in a Time of Bureaucratic Ethics Regulation; ?coauthored the American Anthropological Association commentaries on the 2011 and 2015 proposed revisions to the Common Rule (US research ethics regulations); and was a member of the multidisciplinary panel responsible for the National Research Council 2014 consensus report evaluating those proposals.? She is completing books on ethnography and the moral ordering of disciplinary practices and on divergent ideas about research “sources”, “data”, “archives”, and their uses in anthropology, historiography, and the social and behavioral sciences. ?
She teaches courses on gender, economic experience as culture, anthropology of ethics (which focuses on the uses and abuses of deception and disclosure in popular culture and the sciences), fieldwork methods, anthropology of science, and Pacific Island cultures.? Beginning in Fall 2017, she will also teach ANT 300 (“Experience, Evidence, and Ethnography”).
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Selected Publications
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
WHO SPEAKS HERE? Formality and the Politics of Exchange in Mendi (J Polynesian Society 1980)
SORCERY AND SOCIAL CHANGE in Mendi (Social Analysis 1981)
CHAMBRI ENDGAME: history and anthropology in New Guinea (Peasant Studies 1984)
CHANGING TIMES IN MENDI: Notes Toward Writing Highland New Guinea History (Ethnohistory 1986)
THE RETURN OF REDWOMAN: Fieldwork in Highland New Guinea (Women in the Field, ed. Golde 1986)
WHAT GIFTS ENGENDER: Social Relations and Politics in Highland New Guinea (Cambridge U P 1986), Chapter 2 Sem relations: solidarity and its limits
WHAT GIFTS ENGENDER: Social Relations and Politics in Highland New Guinea (Cambridge U P 1986), Chapter 3 Twem: personal exchange partnerships
WHAT GIFTS ENGENDER: Social Relations and Politics in Highland New Guinea (Cambridge U P 1986), Chapter 6 Sai le at Senkere: the politics of a pig festival
SOUTHERN PERSPECTIVES on the New Guinea Highlands (American Ethnologist 1987)
CONTESTED ORDER: Gender and Society in the Southern New Guinea Highlands (American Ethnologist 1989)
BIG MEN, LARGE AND SMALL? Towards a Comparative Perspective (Ethnology 1990)
PRETEXTS FOR ETHNOGRAPHY: On Reading Fieldnotes (Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, ed. Sanjek 1990)
COMPARATIVE STRATEGIES: Dialect(ic)s of the Gift (Pacific Studies 1991)
MENDI (Encyclopedia of World Cultures, ed. Levinson 1991)
'INTERESTS' IN EXCHANGE: Increment, Equivalence, and the Limits of Bigmanship (Big Men and Great Men, eds. Godelier and Strathern 1991)
ANTI ANTI 'ANTI-SCIENCE' (American Anthropologist 1996)
GLOBALIZATION AND THE FUTURE OF 'CULTURE AREAS': Melanesian Anthropology in Transition (Annual Review of Anthropology 1998)
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE BIG MAN (Int'l Encycl of the Soc and Beh'l Sciences, eds. Smelser/Hannerz 2000)
IRBs AND ORAL HISTORY: Bureaucratic Oversight of Human Research and Disciplinary Diversity (Anthropology News 2004)
TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF DISCIPLINARITY (Critical Matrix 2004)
CHALLENGING AUDIENCES: Critical Ethnography in/for Oceania (Critical Ethnography in the Pacific, eds. Carucci and Dominy, Anthropological Forum 2005)
UNCHOSEN GROUNDS: Cultivating Cross-Subfield Accents for a Public Voice (Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle, eds. Segal and Yanagisako 2005)
THE PERILS OF WORKING AT HOME: IRB 'Mission Creep' as Context and Content for an Ethnography of Disciplinary Knowledges (American Ethnologist 2006)
INTRODUCTION: ANXIOUS BORDERS between Work and Life in a Time of Bureaucratic Ethics Regulation (American Ethnologist 2006)
Rejoinder: THE ETHICAL IS POLITICAL (American Ethnologist 2006)
Ethnography proposals pose problems for IRBs; Dealing with ethnographic issues (Interviews appearing in IRB Advisor, September 2006)
EDUCATE YOUR IRB: An Experiment in Cross-Disciplinary Communication (Anthropology News 2007)
COMPARATIVE 'RESEARCH': A Modest Proposal Concerning the Object of Ethics Regulation (PoLAR 2007)
ANTHROPOLOGICAL REGIONALISM (A New History of Anthropology, ed. Kuklick 2008)
COMPARING ETHICS CODES AND CONVENTIONS (Anthropology News 2009)
COLLABORATIVE METHODS: A COMPARISON OF SUBFIELD STYLES (Reviews in Anthropology 2011)
IMAGINE ETHICS WITHOUT IRBs (Anthropology News 2012)
ETHICS: PRACTICES, PRINCIPLES, AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES (LEDERMAN ETHICS CHAPTER 2012)
Rena Lederman and other members of the National Research Council Committee on Revisions to the Common Rule, 2014. Proposed Revisions to the Common Rule. Washington, DC: National Academies Press
Big Man, Anthropology of (International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences 2015
Course Syllabi
??ANT 203: Economic Life in Cultural Context
??MAKING GENDER: BODIES, MEANINGS, VOICES (ANT 209)
??ETHNOGRAPHER'S CRAFT (ANT 301)
??PACIFIC CULTURES (ANT 352)
??DECEPTION IN MAGIC AND SCIENCE (ANT 360)
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