JANET DIXON KELLER
Professor, incoming editor Ethos
Over the past three decades I have explored issues in cognition and symbolism through research on both verbal and nonverbal practices. My publications reflect two trajectories: one focused on the South Pacific and the other focused generally on theoretical developments integrating culture and mind.
The South Pacific is a fantastically diverse and colorful region of the world little known to many in America except through myths of paradise lived (especially during vacations in the islands or media scoops). My research focuses not on this mythical construction but on the rich contemporary scenes where nation-state formation, persisting (U.S. and other) colonialism, constant migration from islands to the Pacific Rim and back again, politics of identity and power, fragile environments and catastrophic events collide. Throughout the 20,000 islands of Oceania this cacophony of the present is consistently centered on what is regionally known as The Pacific Way. Locally (even micro-locally) constructed, yet resonating internationally, The Pacific Way creates an approach to the future inspired by the cultural heritages of island life-ways. My own research focuses on the dynamic struggles of the present, a search for meaning in circumstances of modernity that most everyone aims to transcend. Central to these struggles are artistic performances constituting, today as they did in the past, political critiques and proposals. Sometimes blatant, at other times veiled, these expressive venues broadcast community and individual voices throughout the islands. Unquestionably performers have the ears of their leadership. My work aims to decode and disseminate these voices beyond their homelands.
More generally I have pursued questions of the individual in society asking about the limits to both social construction of the person and individual free will. From a variety of perspectives and in numerous ethnographic sites including the South Pacific and artist communities of the west, I have addressed tensions among group constraints and innovative takes emergent in human activities and associated processes of identity formation. Beyond my own research I have used comparisons incorporating primary works of others with similar research interests but different ethnographic foci to build toward a general theoretical framework promoting investigations of the give and take between cultural encompassment and subjectivity.
Research Interests:
Linguistic anthropology, cognition and symbolism, language and visualization, activity and practice theories; Oceania and contemporary US
My research investigates the interactions between culture and mind. This requires a focus on the mechanisms for learning, memory and the use of cultural knowledge in the production and revision of cultural practices. Ethnographic sites have included West Futuna, Vanuatu where I focused on language, cosmological principles and the technology and symbolism of plaiting. With Charles Keller I have also worked with expert artist-blacksmiths who constitute a distributed community in Western Europe and North America. Charlie and I have published on the organizing principles, forging techniques and the integration of verbal and visual reasoning in the activities of these artisans.
Recently, in collaboration with Takaronga Kuautonga of the Vanuatu Cultural Center, I have published a volume on the relevance of traditional narrative for contemporary Pacific lifeways (www.las.uiuc.edu/alumni/news/fall2005/05fall_pacificway.html). We also explore convergent symbolic properties of narrative, landscape design and reciprocal exchange in an effort to address the scaffolding of basic cultural values. My most recent extension of this work centers on developing a comparison between islanders' critiques of modernity and the community ethos valued in traditional narrative and lifeways. This project investigates the continuity and transformations in knowledge and values persisting long after the original scaffolding or supporting conditions in social practice and the environment have disappeared.
I am also interested in uses of literacy in Vanuatu, looking both at the many variations in contemporary practices and at local resistance to some forms of literacy.
EDUCATION:
A.B. Anthropology (Phi Beta Kappa), University of California, Davis, 1970
Ph.D. Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 1975
SSRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Linguistics, MIT, 1975-1976
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
Publications before 1987 appear under the name Dougherty. For more publications please see my Vita.
Books:
| 2007 | (with Takaronga Kuautonga) Nokonofo Kitea: We Keep on Living this Way. Oral Literature and Musical Lyrics from West Futuna, Vanuatu. Belair, Aus:Crawford House and Honolulu: University of Hawai'i. |  |
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1996 | (with Charles Keller) Cognition and Tool Use: The Blacksmith at Work. Cambridge University Press. |
| 1983 | West Futuna - Aniwa: An Introduction to the Language of Polynesian Outlier. Berkeley: University of California Press. |  |
Edited Volumes:
| 1985 | Dougherty, J.W.D. Directions in Cognitive Anthropology. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. |
| 1982 | Dougherty, J.W.D., James Fernandez, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, and Norman E. Whitten, Jr. Symbolism and Cognition II. Special Issue of the American Ethnologist 9(4):635-832. |
| 1981 | Dougherty, J.W.D., James Fernandez, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, and Norman E. Whitten, Jr. Symbolism and Cognition. Special Issue of the American Ethnologist 8(3):413-666. |
Essays & Articles:
| 2004 | "Human Cognitive Ecology: An Instructive Paradigm for Comparative Primatology." American Journal of Primatology. |
| 2002 | "Spatial Representations in Island Worlds." In G. Bennardo (Ed.) Space in Oceania: Culture in Language and Mind. Special Issue Pacific Linguistics. |
| 1995 | (with Charles Keller) "Imagery in Cultural Traditions and Innovation." Mind, Culture and Activity 6:1:3-32. |
| 1993 | (with F.K. Lehman) "Computational Complexity in the Cognitive Modeling of Cultural Categories." In Pascal Boyer (ed.) Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. |
| 1991 | (with F.K. Lehman) "Complex Categories." Cognitive Science 15(2):271-291. |
| 1988 | "Woven World: Neotraditional Symbols of Unity in Vanuatu." Mankind 18(1):1-13. |
| 1978 | "Salience and Relativity in Classification." American Ethnologist 5(1):55-80. |
COURSES TAUGHT:
| ANTH 104 | TALKING CULTURE |
| ANTH 185 | THE GLOBAL PACIFIC (CEAPS 185) |
| ANTH 270/271 | INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY |
| ANTH 465 | PEOPLES AND CULTURES OF OCEANIA |
| ANTH 512 | LANGUAGE AND CULTURE |
| ANTH 517 | ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO MEMORY |