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 Niko Besnier
is Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of
Sociology & Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam.
He has also taught at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign (1986-88), Yale University (1989-95), Victoria University
of Wellington (1996-2002), and UCLA (2002-05). He has held
visiting appointments or fellowships at the University of Hawai'i,
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, University of
Auckland, and Kagoshima University. In 2009, he is visiting
scholar at Waseda University.
He was born in Algeria, and brought
up in Spain and Britain. He is a citizen of the U.S., New
Zealand, and France.
He has conducted extensive field research in the Pacific, principally on
Nukulaelae
Atoll,
Tuvalu, where he has spent a total of four years since 1979, as well as
Tonga, where he began fieldwork in 1977, shortly after obtaining a
BA in Mathematics from the College
of Creative Studies at the University of California at Santa
Barbara. He obtained a PhD from the University of
Southern California in 1986, and an MA from Stanford University in 1981.
Niko Besnier's research has received funding from the (U.S.) National Science
Foundation (twice), the Marsden Fund
of the Royal Society of New Zealand, the Wenner-Gren Foundation
(twice), the Harry F. Guggenheim Foundation, the Netherlands
Organization for Scientific Research (three times), the Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science, and several local funds.
Besnier is on the editorial board of a number of journals in anthropology,
gender & sexuality studies, and linguistics.
He was Chair of
the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (1995-96), Chief Examiner in Social and Cultural Anthropology for the
International
Baccalaureate (1998-2003), and Member-at-Large for the Society of Linguistic Anthropology
of the American Anthropological Association (2004-07). He is
currently serving a four-year term (2008-2012) on the
Advisory Board of the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
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Research Project: Sites of Modernity on the Edge of the Global
(see book manuscript)
Members of diasporas engage in complex negotiations over the meaning of modernity.
Complementing our robust understanding of diasporic
migrants’ experiences, this project focuses on the less
well-understood ways in which those who stay in the homeland engage
with global–local tensions, taking Tonga (South Pacific) as an
illustrative case. Persons
define the meaning of modernity actively and inter-subjectively, and
do so in particular sites of everyday life, in which emotions,
morality, and the body figure
prominently as tools through which agents engage in
modernity-seeking projects. I analyze the shape of these
projects in sites as diverse as the flea market, the beauty salon, the pawn shop, the gym, beauty
pageants, and Charismatic Christian churches, all of which
emerge at the cutting edge of modernity, albeit in very different
ways. The project aims to develop our understanding of how global
forces intertwine with local dynamics cross-culturally, and to
analyze how emotions, morality, and the body mediate people's
engagement with macroscopic dynamics of globalization and modernity.
Research Project: Gender and Sexuality at the Intersection of the Global and the Local
This project, now in its second decade, seeks to investigate the relationship among
masculinity,
transnationalism, and transgenderism in Tonga and in diasporic Tongan communities in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, from political,
economic, social, and cultural angles. The fieldwork was conducted principally in
Nuku'alofa, the capital of Tonga, as well as Auckland, New Zealand. It seeks to understand ways in which Tongan transgender position
themselves on the boundary between the local and a cosmopolitan non-locality, with different consequences depending on cultural and
material resources available to different persons. This position enables transgender Tongans to lay claims to dignity and respect, but
it also constitutes a problematic assertion of non-locality, to which non-transgender Tongans react variously particular the straight
men who are potential sexual partners. The longevity of the project has provided a particularly interesting perspective on the vast changes
that these dynamics have undergone.
Research Project: Gossip and the Everyday Production of
Politics (book in press)
Beyond the contexts that are generally considered to be the
canonical location of politics, political action is located in
everyday contexts of social life, interwoven into the ordinariness
of everyday existence. I seek inspiration from dialogues with Marx and Gramsci
to
dismantle the limitations of "resistance theory" through
an exploration of political actions that do not map easily onto a
contrast between oppressor and oppressed. Using an analysis of
gossip as a platform to pursue these theoretical aims, I bring together
two methodological traditions, the microscopic analysis of unelicited interaction
and the macroscopic interpretation of social practice. I gathered the
ethnographic materials on which this book is based on Nukulaelae
Atoll in the Central Pacific, inhabited by 350 people, but my ethnography
and historical analysis focus as much on local processes as it
does on the relationship between the
wider world and this out-of-the-way atoll, which together with the
rest of Tuvalu has become the
"poster child" of global warming. I argue
that local responses to these dynamics are continuous with prior
self-representations that the atoll dwellers engaged in when faced
with the outside world, and that gossip figures prominently in the way in
which these representations are generated.
Research Project: Globalization Without the West:
Polynesian Rugby Players in Japan
This project, currently in its infancy, seeks to explore ways in which
globalization "bypasses" the West, through an analysis of the experience of
Tongan, Samoan, Fijian, and New Zealand Maori rugby professionals playing on Japanese teams. The
"cultural divide" that separates Japan from the rest of the world is commonly
evaluated in terms of Japan's cultural "otherness" in
comparison to North
America and Europe. This "otherness" acquires complexity when the object of comparison shifts to societies
like those of "Greater Polynesia" (i.e., the Pacific
Islands and their main diasporic center, Aotearoa New Zealand), which
are, among other things, just as communalistic as Japanese society
is often portrayed as being. Highly talented Polynesian rugby professionals are
both individualistic career workers and agents who are often
deeply embedded in structures of reciprocity and indebtedness in
the contexts in which they grew up. This project focuses on how
Polynesian rugby players in Japan and the people who surround them
(e.g., managers, universities, recruiters, teammates, employers,
spouses, families) negotiate
these various positionings. I will conduct ethnographic
fieldwork among the players in Japan, as well as, wherever
possible, their families and connections in the islands and New
Zealand or Australia. More generally, the project seeks to
explore ways in which
globalization takes place independently of the relationship of the
West with the Rest.
Research Project: The Emergence of Community in Palm
Springs, California
More than any other township in California or the United
States, Palm Springs has brought together in the course of its
history a broad range of constituencies, which have achieved a
remarkable level of congenial co-existence despite their very
divergent aspirations. From indigenous Native American bands
to casino workers, from Hollywood stars in pre-WWII days to
college party-seekers in the 1960s, from the new wealthy of the
post-Reagan years to people living with HIV in the 1980s seeking a
hard-to-come-by social structure to help them cope with the
illness, from aging gay men in search of a second adolescence to
elderly snowbirds to New-Agers fascinated by the special nature of
the surroundings,
waves of newcomers have left their mark on Palm Springs.
This ethnographic project investigates the formation of community,
in the comparative context of other kinds of communities in
American society.
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