Catherine L. Besteman

Catherine Lowe Besteman is an anthropologist and holds position of Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She has taught at that institution since 1994.^[1] She is known for her work with Somali Bantu refugees who have migrated from East Africa to Lewiston, Maine since 2005.

Early life and education

Besteman received her BA from Amherst College and her MA and PhD from the University of Arizona.^[1]

Career

Besteman’s areas of expertise include refugees; southern Somalia, South Africa, and, more generally; insecurity and violence;^[2] and inequality and racism. She also specializes in studying humanitarianism and activism. She writes in support of an engaged aprroach to anthropology, which involves advocacy, teaching, and collaboration with the people who are the focus of study.^[3] Besteman has studied Southern Somalia extensively, and has written a number of books and papers about this area.^[4] She has criticized traditional anthropological and media portrayals of Somalis and of the Somalian civil war since it began in the early 1990s,^[5] and her opinions and methods are considered to be controversial by some anthropologists.^[6][7]

Research and work

Besteman began working in southern Somalia in the late eighties before the outbreak of civil war in 1991.^[8][9] Many refugees from the communities where she had worked in Somalia have resettled in Lewiston, Maine.^[10] Under her direction, members of the local Bantu community and Colby College students have produced a wiki-type website about the Somali Bantus of Lewiston. A museum exhibition, "Rivers of Immigration: Peoples of the Androscoggin" was mounted at the Museum L-A, in conjunction with the wiki project, from 2009 - 2010.^[11]

During the 2000s, Besteman studied Cape Town, South Africa, focusing on the work of grassroots organizations in the city after the end of apartheid. Her book Transforming Cape Town (2008) describes several of these organizations and contrasts incidents of traditionalism with those of innovation.^[12]

Besteman received a Guggenheim Foundation grant and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship in 2012 to work on a book project.^[13][14] In late 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded a residency to Catherine Besteman for spring 2014.^[15]

Besteman has co-edited two books for general readership: Why America’s Top Pundits are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back (2005), and The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It (2009).

Selected publications

Books

• Gusterson, H. & Besteman, C.L. (Eds.). (2009). The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It. University of California Press.
• Besteman, C. (2008). Transforming Cape Town. University of California Press.
• Besteman, C. L., & Gusterson, H. (Eds.). (2005). Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back. University of California Press.
• Besteman, C. L. (Ed.). (2002). Violence: A Reader. New York University Press.
• Besteman, C. (1999). Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery. University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Besteman, C., & Cassanelli, L. V. (1996). The Struggle for Land in Southern Somalia: the War Behind the War. Westview Press.
• Besteman, C. (2016). "Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine." Duke University Press

Papers

• Besteman, C. (2010). In and Out of the Academy: Policy and the Case for a Strategic Anthropology. Human Organization, 69(4), 407-417.
• Besteman, C. (1998). Primordialist blinders: A reply to IM Lewis. Cultural Anthropology, 13(1), 109-120.
• Besteman, C. (1996). Representing violence and "othering" Somalia. Cultural Anthropology, 11(1), 120-133.
• Besteman, C. (1996). Violent politics and the politics of violence: the dissolution of the Somali nation‐state. American Ethnologist, 23(3), 579-596.^[16]
• Besteman, C. (1994). Individualisation and the assault on customary tenure in Africa: title registration programmes and the case of Somalia. Africa-London-International African Institute, 64, 484-484.

References

1. "Catherine L. Besteman · College Directory". Colby College.
2. Martin Shaw (19 September 2013). Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitions of the Late Modern World. Cambridge University Press. pp. 176–. ISBN 978-1-107-46910-5.
3. Low, S. M., & Merry, S. E. (2010). Engaged anthropology: diversity and dilemmas. Current Anthropology, 51(S2), S203-S226.
4. Mohamed Haji Mukhtar (25 February 2003). Historical Dictionary of Somalia. Scarecrow Press. pp. 332–. ISBN 978-0-8108-6604-1.
5. Abdi Kusow (2004). Putting the cart before the horse: contested nationalism and the crisis of the nation-state in Somalia. Red Sea Press. p. 159. ISBN 978-1-56902-202-3.
6. Jonny Steinberg (6 January 2015). A Man of Good Hope. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. pp. 343–. ISBN 978-0-385-35273-4.
7. Richard Alqaq (28 February 2009). Managing World Order: United Nations Peace Operations and the Security Agenda. I.B.Tauris. pp. 202–. ISBN 978-0-85771-459-6.
8. "Catherine Besteman". Global Experts.
9. Aline Gubrium; Krista Harper (30 April 2013). Participatory Visual and Digital Methods. Left Coast Press. pp. 137–. ISBN 978-1-61132-711-3.
10. William Haviland; Harald Prins; Dana Walrath; Bunny McBride (21 February 2013). Anthropology: The Human Challenge. Cengage Learning. pp. 398–. ISBN 1-133-94132-X.
11. Androscoggin Bank. "Rivers of Immigration: Peoples of the Androscoggin". museumla.org.
12. Denis-Constant Martin (June 2013). Sounding the Cape Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa. African Minds. pp. 368–. ISBN 978-1-920489-82-3.
13. "Catherine Besteman". gf.org.
14. http://www.acls.org/research/fellow.aspx?cid=65742366-258a-e111-bd9e-000c293a51f7
15. "Besteman receives Rockefeller Foundation grant". thecolbyecho.com.
16. Hannah Whittaker (13 October 2014). Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Kenya: A Social History of the Shifta Conflict, C. 1963-1968. BRILL. pp. 70–. ISBN 978-90-04-28308-4.

External links

• Catherine Besteman’s Colby College web page: http://www.colby.edu/directory_cs/clbestem/
• Museum L-A Rivers of Immigration web page: http://www.museumla.org/Rivers-of-Immigration
• The Somali Bantu Experience: From East Africa to Maine wiki: http://wiki.colby.edu/display/AY298B
• Network of Concerned Anthropologists website: http://sites.google.com/site/concernedanthropologists/home