Stanley H. Brandes

1941-Present

    Stanley Brandes was born on December 26^th of 1942 in New York City. He earned his B.A in history at the University of Chicago in 1964 and graduated with a Special Honors Award. He earned his M.A. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969. Brandes became an anthropologist in 1971 when he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California , Berkeley. When Brandes was asked what drove him to become an anthropologist he said :

            “Adventuresomeness of the field” and “I enjoy the fieldwork”.

    Brandes has done field work in Mexico, Spain, Guatemala and the United States. He is a fellow member of the American Anthropological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Ethnological Society, and the Society for Psychological Anthropology, just to name a few. From 1971 to 1974 Brandes was the Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University. From 1974 to 1981 he worked at Berkeley. From 1981 to 1982 Brandes was the Director of the Barcelona Study Center at the University of Barcelona. Since 1982 Brandes has been the Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.

    Some of Brandes most recent and popular field work is the book Staying Sober in Mexico City. He participated over several years in an all men's chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous and observed how recovering alcoholics in Mexico redefine gender roles in order to preserve masculine identity.

    For more than 30 years Brandes has studied European and Latin American ethnography. Lately he has been focusing on a wider variety of study which includes peasant society and culture, demographic anthropology, folklore, the life course, symbolism, ritual and religion, food and drink, and most recently visual anthropology. Brandes believes that his work reflects sensitivity to regional, ethnic, class and gender diversity. Brandes says “I believe strongly in the ethnographic field tradition”. As of this moment Brandes is studying three major topics: Mexico's Day of the Dead,  Alcoholics Anonymous in Mexico City, and photography and anthropology. Mexico's Day of the Dead is written from a historical and an ethnographic perspective. This is because of Brandes interest in folklore. Alcoholics Anonymous was the last publication and was published in 2002. Brandes has over 100 publications to date. Some of his publications are:

    Migration, Kinship, and Community: Tradition and Transition in a Spanish Village (1975)                                

    Metaphors of Masculinity: Sex and Status in Andalusian Folklore (1980)

    Forty: The Age and the Symbol (1985)

    Power and Persuasion: Fiestas and Social Control in Rural Mexico (1988)

    Staying Sober in Mexico City (2002)

    

References:

Personal Communications with Stanley Brandes via telephone March 03

“Anthropology at Berkeley” Berkeley Anthropology Department http://anthropology.berkeley.edu 

“Staying Sober in Mexico City” www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/brasta.html

 http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/anth/brandes.html

 

Written by: Michael Serrano

Edited by: Lillian Dolentz, 2009