Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Education

Ph.D., M.A., Anthropology
University of California, Santa Cruz
          Dissertation: The Social Life of an Amazonian Highway:
         Speculation, Mobility, and Development Politics in Brazil

Davidson College
B.A., Anthropology and Ethnic Studies

Dr. Jeremy M. Campbell is a political and environmental anthropologist whose work focuses on migration, agriculture, and property speculation in the Brazilian Amazon.  He is particularly interested in the ways people come to know their environment and how that knowledge becomes politicized in moments of broad and rapid socioeconomic changes.  In Amazonia, Dr. Campbell has conducted over two years of ethnographic research that documents the forms of authority and place-making that local peoples improvise as the character of their region shifts from that of an extractive frontier to a workshop for sustainability schemes.  He is currently finishing a book about how native Amazonians, landless peasants, and well-heeled farmers make sense of the layered history of development along an unpaved forest highway, a road upon which a variety of contrasting hopes for wealth, conservation, indigenous sovereignty, and rural governance have been pinned.

Primary Research Interests

• Development and modernity in Amazonia
• Property, land speculation, and territorial governance
• Environmental, agrarian, and rural politics
• Mobility, landscape, and subjectivity
• Indigenous and environmental social movements in Latin America
• Capitalism, corruption, and the state
  

Courses Taught

• Environmental Anthropology
• Political Ecology
• Amazonia
• Political Anthropology
• Ethnographies of Latin America
• Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
• Sustainability Studies

Contact

401-254-3583
CAS 131
jmcampbell@rwu.edu