Anthropology for Radical Optimism
Anthropology for Radical Optimism
Smadar Lavie is an anthropologist, author, and activist specializing in the anthropology of Egypt, Israel and Palestine, with special emphasis on issues of race, gender and religion. She is a visiting professor at the Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century, University College Cork. She received her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1989) and spent nine years as Assistant and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Lavie authored The Poetics of Military Occupation (UC Press, 1990), receiving the 1990 Honorable Mention of the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing, and Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (Berghahn 2014). She also co-edited Creativity/Anthropology (Cornell UP, 1993) and Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (Duke UP, 1996). Lavie won the American Studies Association’s 2009 Gloria Anzaldúa Prize for her article, “Staying Put: Crossing the Palestine-Israel Border with Gloria Anzaldúa,” published in Anthropology and Humanism (2011). In 2013, she won the “Heart at East” Honor Plaque for lifetime service to Mizraḥi communities in Israel-Palestine.
Earlier this week the American Anthropological Association’s task force on Engagement with Israel-Palestine issued a 130-page report to assess whether […]