James Ferguson
Stanford University, Department of Anthropology

An African Studies Committee Baobab Lecture:
Neoliberalism for the Poor?
Reflections on Poverty Policy in Southern Africa

Thursday, January 11, 2007, 3:30 Reception, 4:00 Talk, Gerlinger Lounge

Professor Ferguson’s research has been conducted in Lesotho and Zambia, and has engaged a broad range of theoretical and ethnographic issues. A central theme running through it has been a concern with the political, broadly conceived, and with the relation between specific social and cultural processes and the abstract narratives of “development” and “modernization” through which such processes have so often been known and understood.

A book of Ferguson's essays on issues of globalization and governmentality in contemporary Africa (Global Shadows: Essays on Africa in the Neoliberal World Order) will be published by Duke University Press in early 2006. The essays address a range of specific topics, ranging from “structural adjustment,” the crisis of the state, and the emergence of new forms of government-via-NGO, to the question of the changing social meaning of “modernity” for colonial and postcolonial urban Africans. He is now beginning a new research project in South Africa, exploring the emergence of new problematics of poverty and social policy under conditions of neoliberalism.

	1990, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge University Press.
	1999, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt., University of California Press.
	1997, Editor, Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (with Akhil Gupta), Duke University Press.
	1997, Editor, Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science (with Akhil Gupta), Univ. of California Press.