VIRGINIA R DOMINGUEZ
Professor

VIRGINIA R. DOMINGUEZ is currently Editor of the AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST (since July 2002) and Co-Director of the International Forum for U.S. Studies, which she co-founded in 1995 with a Rockefeller Humanities Residency Site Grant. A past President of the (U.S.) Society for Cultural Anthropology, and past Director of the Center for International and Comparative Studies at the University of Iowa, she now also serves on the Board of Directors of the new International Association for American Studies (whose officers are located on 4 continents).

Over the past 12 years, she has served on a variety of Editorial Boards for interdisciplinary journals and book series as well as for anthropology journals. These include Public Culture, the American Quarterly (published by the U.S. American Studies Association), the American Ethnologist, and Communal/Plural: Journal of Transnational & Crosscultural Studies (published in Australia, with a very international and also interdisciplinary Editorial Board). She currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (published in the U.K. and the U.S. with a very international and interdisciplinary Editorial Board), and Comparative American Studies: An International Journal.

She was born in Cuba, but spent much of her early life in and out of the United States. Other countries she has called home include Uruguay (where she went to high school), Puerto Rico, Mexico, Lebanon, Israel, and most recently Hungary. For a time in 1974 she also lived in Surinam. Growing up largely bilingual, she developed a love of languages--learning them, using them in fieldwork, in archival work, and in professional work such as manuscript reviewing, teaching, and conference presentations.

Since completing her Ph.D. in 1979 at Yale University, she has been a member of the regular faculty at Duke University (1979-1991), the University of California at Santa Cruz (1991-1993), and the University of Iowa (since 1993). In addition, she was Fulbright Visiting Professor of Social Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1984-1985, and Salgo Professor of American Studies at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest in 2001.

At the core of her work for many years has been a fascination with how people and societies conceptualize sameness and difference both within and outside the units they consider their own. Older work in anthropology addressed these issues within the literature on kinship, descent, and alliance systems as well as on "race,"and within the literatures on religion, "totemism," and ethnosemantics. Much newer work addresses related concerns under the rubric of "imagined communities," and is evident in discussions of transnationalism, multiple identities, and hybridity. Virginia Dominguez tries to explore how those things we often casually refer to as "ethnicity" or "identity," or even "subject positions," develop over time and across particular spaces, how they become discursively naturalized, systematized, and institutionally entrenched, and how and why they appear to change.

This has often led her to explore research methods more commonly employed outside anthropology, including extensive legal research, public discourse analysis, census research, print media research, and archival research in addition to participant observation. Much of her current research--in connection with her book under contract (tentatively entitled Mamama's World(s): When the Enemy Is Unclear)--uses and theorizes photographic representations as well.

Over the years, this has meant relating to more and more "communities of scholars," even within the American Anthropological Association. At the present time she is a member of 8 of its constituent Sections: The Society for Cultural Anthropology, the American Ethnological Society, the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, the Council for Museum Anthropology, the Association for Feminist Anthropology, the Middle East Section, the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, and the Society for Visual Anthropology. And she continues to serve on the Selection Committee for the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize (for significant contributions in the area of gender and health), which she established with and through the Society for Medical Anthropology in 1997.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

2000. "For a Politics of Love and Rescue." Cultural Anthropology.(Oct-Nov.) 

1998. "Exporting U.S. Concepts of Race: Are There Limits to the U.S. Model? Social Research, Vol. 65, No. 2 (summer), pp. 369-399. 

1998. From Beijing to Port Moresby: The Politics of National Identity in Cultural Policies. Senior Editor (edited with David Wu). New York: Gordon and Breach. 

1998. "Asserting (Trans)Nationalism and the Social Conditions of Its Possibility," Communal/plural: Journal Of Transnational And Crosscultural Studies 6 (2): 139-156. 

1997. "The Racialist Politics of Concepts, or Is It the Racialist Concepts of Politics?" Ethos 

1996. "Rethinking American Studies in a Critical Internationalism" (co-authored with Jane Desmond), The American Quarterly 48 (September):475-490. 

1996. "Theorizing Culturalism: From Cultural Policies to Identity Politics and Back". In Theory Rules: Art As Theory, Theory And Art. Edited by Jody Berland, Will Straw, and David Tomas. Toronto: University of Toronto Press and YYZ Books. 

1996. "Disciplining Anthropology." In Disciplinarity And Dissent In Cultural Studies. Edited by Cary Nelson and Dilip Gaonkar. Pp. 37-61. New York: Routledge. 

1993. "A Taste for 'the Other': Intellectual Complicity in Racializing Practices," Current Anthropology Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 333-348 [receiving full *CA treatment, accompanied by author's Response] 

1993. "Invoking Culture: The Messy Side of 'Cultural Politics,'" South Atlantic Quarterly (1). Reprinted in Eloquent Obsessions (Duke University Press 1994), edited by Marianna Torgovnick. And reprinted in Coming Into Focus: Essays In Culture And Policy (The Free Press, 1999), edited by Glenn Wallach. 

1989. People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in Contemporary Israel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 

1986. White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press (1994--paperback edition)