Roger Lancaster
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Roger Lancaster is a professor of
Lancaster is a fellow in the American Anthropological Association. From 2004 to 2006, he served as the AAA's media liaison on kinship, the family, and marriage, fielding questions on same-sex marriage from a range of major media organizations.[2][3]
Career
Lancaster's first book, Thanks to God and the Revolution: Religion and Class Consciousness in the New Nicaragua (1988), was a study of liberation theology and other religious currents in Sandinista Nicaragua. Joining debates on the nature and origins of
Lancaster's first book had traced the Sandinista revolution's ascent; his second book examined its decline. Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (1992) was an ethnography of everyday life during the
Lancaster's third monograph, The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture (2003), was a polemic against evolutionary psychology and other reductionist explanations for gender roles and sexual orientations. The book contrasts anthropological and historical perspectives on cultural diversity with evolutionary just-so stories, defending a social constructionist approach to human nature in chapters on sexual selection, masculinity, beauty, the social organization of reproduction, and the gay gene. The book's argument proceeds in part by showing that reductionist ideas are unscientific on their own terms and in part by underscoring a historical irony: stories about a hardwired and immutable human nature fluoresce in a period marked by pitched political struggles around sex, when shifts in production and institutional changes have thrown gender and sexual roles into question. Such stories offer comfort and certainty at a time when not much really seems certain about the nature of men, women, and others.
His fourth monograph, Sex Panic and the Punitive State (2011), won the author’s second Ruth Benedict Prize. The book's first part provides a historical and ethnographic account of modern sex offender laws in the US; it shows how a series of sex panics have institutionalized a culture of sexual fear and produced draconian, ineffective laws. Its second part provides a wider polemical analysis of the development of mass incarceration and other aspects of the punitive state.
In addition to his monographs, Lancaster coedited (with Micaela di Leonardo) The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy (1997), a large advanced interdisciplinary introduction to the field. The Reader foregrounded historical, anthropological, and political-economic approaches at a time when literary theory dominated the field.
Works
- Sex Panic and the Punitive State, University of California Press, 2011, 9780520262065
- The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture, University of California Press, 2003, 0520236203
- Edited with Micaela di Leonardo, The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy, Routledge, 1997, 0415910056
- Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua, University of California Press, 1992, ISBN 0-520-08929-4
- Thanks to God and the Revolution: Popular Religion and Class Consciousness in the New Nicaragua, Columbia University Press, 1988, 0231067305
References
- ^ "Faculty and Staff: Roger N Lancaster". Cultural Studies. Retrieved June 5, 2016.
- ^ "US Marriage Model is Not Universal Norm". Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Retrieved April 28, 2011.
- ^ "MARRIAGE: THE STATE OF THE UNION; A knot tied in many ways; Anthropologists and historians point out that the history of matrimony is quite fluid. The constant? Economics". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved April 28, 2011.
- ^ "The Society for the Study of Social Problems | Past Winners".
- ^ "Winners of the Ruth Benedict Prize « AQA". Archived from the original on March 5, 2016. Retrieved March 5, 2016.
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