Over the past three decades, James Clifford has been one of the most original, influential, and controversial scholars working in anthropology. His work has challenged the conventions of anthropology by offering new ways to understand the forces and interactions that shape cultures. Trained as an historian, Clifford received his M.A. from Stanford University and B.A. from Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Clifford received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1977.
Dr. Clifford is currently a professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California in Santa Cruz and has been since 1978. Throughout his career he has also acted as a visiting professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Yale University. Dr. Clifford has spoken at approximately nine invited lectures every year for the past decade or so at various universities, museums and research center in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Latin America.
Over the years Clifford has acquired many different honors and grants. Most recently, he was named the Faculty Research Lecturer at UCSC for the 2000-2001 academic year. Faculty Research Lecturers are nominated by the Academic Senate Committee on the Faculty Research Lecture and are approved by members of the Santa Cruz Division of the Academic Senate.
In 1996, he was named the Pavis Lecturer at Open University in Milton Keynes, England. In 1994, he was the Buckham Scholar at the University of Vermont. In 1990, he was the Henry Luce Visiting Scholar at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. In 1989, he was granted the U.S. Presidential award that awarded up to $25,000 which he declined, and in 1986 he was the Visiting Fellow of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.
Throughout his successful career, Dr. Clifford has also written five books and over fifty articles and essays for various publications. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, a book he wrote in 1988, has been translated into seven different languages and is frequently cited in contemporary cultural theory. This book is truly distinctive for its reference to literature and art as well as anthropology.
The general area of Dr. Clifford’s recent work concerns the response of local politics to globalization. He is researching the effects of regional, national, and international power on different cultures by studying museums, festivals, tourism, and ethnic performance. Much of his work focuses on the decolonization of the Pacific region and its impact on the culture of the indigenous people such as native Californians and Pacific Islanders.
Resources:
Former Link, http://humwww.ucsc.edu:16080/~james_clifford/pages/ivframe.html (September 2006)
Former Link, http://humwww.ucsc.edu:16080/~james_clifford/pages/cvframe.html (September 2006)
http://humwww.ucsc.edu/histcon/HisCon.html
http://people.ucsc.edu/~jcliff
Written by: Cara Hendry, 2004