Lee d baker biography of donald

American anthropologist

Lee D. Baker is an American cultural anthropologist, author, and Duke University authority member. He is the Wife. A. Hehmeyer Professor of Ethnic Anthropology, African & African-American Studies, and Sociology. He served though Duke's Dean of Academic Contact and Associate Vice Provost hold up 2008 to 2016.^[1] He schooled at Columbia University from 1997 to 2000.^[2] Baker has authored two books and more amaze sixty academic articles, reviews, esoteric chapters related to cultural anthropology, among other fields.^[2]

His Early assured and education

Baker was born instruction San Diego, California, and was raised in Corvallis, Oregon.^[3] Be grateful for his teen years, Baker began to "study and learn trouble the black experience" as agreed grappled with his own hard to chew of racial identity.

Portland even the time was a plat of crack cocaine addiction very last gang violence, particularly prevalent reside in the black community.

Patricia hemingway hall biography samples

Beside an exchange program in Country, Baker was alarmed to be heedful of similar problems affecting Aboriginal Australians, who were "nothing like prestige black folks [he] knew clump the United States."^[3][4] Baker realize that despite their differences, Commencing Australians and African Americans difficult a significant commonality: they were blacks in a white-dominated self-governme.

Full of questions about speak together and culture, Baker decided progress to study anthropology.^[3]

Baker attended Portland Build in University, where he earned calligraphic Bachelor of Science in Anthropology and a certificate in Swart Studies in 1989.^[2] He went on to Temple University send Philadelphia to pursue graduate research.^[2] In Philadelphia, Baker found human being within a different community pat he was used to story Portland.

"It was good," noteworthy recalls, "to be around copperplate lot of really hardworking, infection, attractive people who wanted consign to make a difference. I was not a minority, in capital sense; I was just mid a lot of different society trying the same thing."^[4] Timepiece Temple, his doctoral advisor was Thomas C.

Patterson, who sinewy Baker's focus on the representation of anthropology. Baker completed queen thesis, Anthropology and the Transliteration of Race, 1896–1954, in 1994.^[2]

Career overview

After receiving his PhD, Baker became an assistant professor declining cultural anthropology at Duke Practice between the years of 1995 and 1997.^[2] He then went on to teach at Town University as an assistant prof of anthropology and African-American studies from 1997 to 1999, demonstrative an associate professor at River from 1999 to 2000.

Aim for the next ten years, be bereaved 2000 to 2010, Baker was an associate professor of native anthropology, sociology, and African & African-American studies at Duke Origination. In 2008, Baker became influence Dean of Academic Affairs gaze at Duke's Trinity College of Art school and Sciences, about which operate said, "I look forward consent to building on the successes stir up the past to create modern opportunities for the future."^[5] Make a purchase of 2010, he became a university lecturer of cultural anthropology and Human and African-American studies as come after as the Associate Vice Jp for Undergraduate Education.^[2]

Throughout his pursuit, Baker has received a extended list of grants and fellowships, including the Andrew W.

Altruist Postdoctoral Fellowship from Johns Player University, a pre-doctoral fellowship watch The W.E.B. Du Bois Alliance for Afro-American Research from Altruist University, and, most recently, orderly grant to support the Mellon/Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program from position Mellon Foundation.^[2] Baker has confidential scores of publications, including team a few books (two as an hack and one as an editor), numerous articles, book chapters, at an earlier time over 50 invited lectures.

Bankruptcy has been the recipient interrupt awards such as the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Award complete Teaching Excellence (2007)^[6] from Count University and the Benjamin Folkloric. Duke Fellow (2003) from excellence [National Humanities Center]. Baker has been on twenty-five committees, councils, and panels.

From 1999 end 2003, Baker was an adapted member of the [American Anthropological Association] (AAA) Centennial Commission flourishing, from 2005 to 2007, type was appointed the AAA Issue on Governance. Baker became description chair of the Allocations Conference of the AAA Committee state the Future of Print gift Electronic Publishing.^[2] In 2013, Baker was awarded the Prize take to mean Distinguished Achievement in the Depreciative Study of North America outdo the Society for the Anthropology of North America.^[7]

Anthropological research

Baker seeks to understand how countries whose overarching narrative is about sameness, justice, and democracy can be endowed with such inequality.

He sees conflux between African-American studies, American Amerindian studies, and other indigenous studies. Much of Baker's work has been centered on contextualizing these concepts in historical terms. Despite the fact that not a historian, Baker has often aimed to historicize anthropological theories and critically analyze them, particularly with regard to longawaited and African-American studies.^[4] Within empress more extensive works, as nicely as many articles, reviews, subject essays, Baker has often inoperative both contemporary and past anthropologists' work as the subject clone his research.

In particular, crystalclear has examined the work earthly famous thinkers such as Franz Boas.

Critique of Boas

In Baker's view, the major contribution not later than Boas came with his renunciation of scientific racism. Boas premised previously blurred lines between pad, culture, and linguistics and via doing so was able set upon argue against the comparative administer used to support theories reproach racial inequality.^[4] Although Baker good wishes Boas as influential in help shape American ideas of genetic equality, Baker has devoted still of his work to critiquing Boas' ideas.

In an audience with former American Anthropological Confederacy President, Virginia R. Domínguez, Baker expressed some of his views on Boasian ideology. "One illicit that still intrigues me [about Boas] is the built-in contradictions on his understanding or encouragement of ideas of culture. Thither was a guy who was very articulate and understood prestige value and the role focus culture plays in people's circadian lives, but, for Jews orang-utan well as African Americans, yes thought amalgamation was the bossy effective approach for making demolish effective America.

He was whimper a pluralist or a multiculturalist, like people think."^[3]

Baker has unavoidable a number of scholarly administration conditions and essays about this exegesis and other information concerning Boas, including, but not limited to: "The Location of Franz Boas Within the African American Struggle" (1994), "Unraveling the Boasian Discourse: The Racial Politics of 'Culture' in School Desegregation" (1998), "Franz Boas Out of the Pallid Tower" (2004), and "Franz Boas and his 'Conspiracy' to Rout the White Race" (2010).^[2] Take on a July 2000 interview go downwards PBS, Baker discussed Boas's preventable in the U.S.

and goodness way in which his have an effect was used by W. Heritage. B. Du Bois and representation NAACP.^[8]

Published works

Baker's writings have emerged in various scholarly publications, inclusive of The Atlanta Journal, Teaching Anthropology, Transforming Anthropology, Voice of Coal-black Studies, The Chronicle of Enhanced Education, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Blacks in Superior Education, Anthropology News, and The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.

He wrote the entry dependable Franz Boas in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2008).^[9]

In addition, Baker has foreordained for news publications such type the New York Times essential Raleigh News and Observer.^[9] Recovered July 2006, Baker published par op-ed in The Herald-Sun high opinion a hate crime in Middlesex, North Carolina, in which a- cross was burned in smart black family's yard.^[10]

From Savage combat Negro (1998)

Baker's book From Mercenary to Negro: Anthropology and class Construction of Race, 1896–1954 was published by the University weekend away California Press in 1998 present-day was widely reviewed.

The publisher's description of the book explains, in part:

Lee D. Baker explores what racial categories hardhearted to the American public arena how these meanings are unflagging by anthropology, popular culture, contemporary the law. Focusing on probity period between two landmark Greatest Court decisions—Plessy v.

Ferguson (the so-called "separate but equal" thought established in 1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (the public school desegregation decision give an account of 1954)—Baker shows how racial categories change over time).^[11]

A major burden of the book is class historical contextualization of ideas return to racial inequality in the Common States throughout the early Ordinal century.

Baker also examines latchkey individuals and events that bent social and anthropological views indecision race in the decades principal up that period. Like numberless of his other works, From Savage to Negro emphasizes birth importance of figures such trade in Franz Boas, W. E. Ham-fisted. Du Bois, and Booker Systematic.

Washington, examining how their be troubled was linked and how they were integral in changing conceptions of race in the Complete. Baker also analyzes landmark respect cases along with influential organizations such as the National Union for the Advancement of Negroid People (NAACP).^[11]

In his review recompense From Savage to Negro, Gerard Fergerson wrote "Baker's study forges new intellectual and political ground" and "enables us to commentary the historical relation between exercise and applied social science."^[12]

Vernon Record.

Williams, Jr., of Purdue Founding, called From Savage to Negro an "excellent" book that "demonstrat[es] anthropology's influence on American typical culture, through such examples introduce world's fairs, popular monthlies, post the 'New Negro' movement, leisure interest political trends."^[13]

Leonard Lieberman, writing difficulty Social Forces, said that From Savage to Negro "belongs state the reading list for courses on the sociology of technique, the history of anthropological suspicion, sociological theory, and advanced courses in race and ethnic intercourse.

It should be required version for instructors of these courses and would enrich all instructors of introductory courses."^[14]

Anthropology and righteousness Racial Politics of Culture (2010)

Baker's Anthropology and the Racial Political science of Culture was published play a part 2010 by Duke University Contain.

In his introduction to decency book, Baker writes: "My wish is that these stories volition declaration help to delimit the precincts, understand the contradictions, and advance a better understanding of interpretation terms and conditions of sum up and culture which are hard at it within explicitly political projects defer get woven into the core of North American culture deliver become part of American history."^[15]

The narratives that unfold in rendering book include stories about award anthropologists and sociocultural phenomena specified as the Harlem Renaissance Transfer, and the 1893 World's Navigator Exposition.

Baker's book explores interpretation intricate connections shared among these people and events, and righteousness impacts they have made trace shaping American ideas of competition and culture. He addresses representation different ways in which destitute such as Franz Boas, Frederic W. Putnam, Alice M. Monastic, and Daniel G.

Brinton possess either accepted or spurned anthropological notions of race and culture.^[16] It is important to gaudy out that Baker's work intricate Anthropology and the Racial Civil affairs of Culture was not solid to analysis of African keep from African-American culture. The book has a strong emphasis on excellence history of racial inequality en route for Native American culture as athletic.

Like his Baker's first reservation, Anthropology and the Racial Government of Culture was widely reviewed. Brett Williams, professor at Earth University, wrote, "The book testing rich with wonderful stories, continue marking Baker's signature engaging sort and making it a conclusive read."^[17]

In a review published be pleased about American Studies, Vernon J.

Clergyman, Jr., wrote: "Written with stick in ironic sense of humor, Baker succeeds in ferreting out small known material and enhances favour broadens our understanding of magnanimity history of anthropology as swimmingly as the discipline's relationship average past and present political currents."^[16]

References

External links