Many anthropologists devote their professional careers to the study of one village or town, immersing themselves in one locality for 30 or more years. Peter Little has traveled a different path. Although he began his scholarly career with a traditional ethnographic study of a small Maasai-related group in northern Kenya, over the last two decades his anthropological pursuits have involved multi-sited ethnographies of topics like development, global commodity chains, and poverty. "My work still remains ethnographically- and locally-based, but the nature of new research questions requires work across disciplinary boundaries and at different locales than a single village," he explains.

A 2007-2008 Guggenheim Fellow, Little is currently completing The Anthropology of Neoliberalism in Sub-Sarahan Africa, in which he examines the anthropology of political and economic changes in Africa across several locations and local "encounters" with democracy, global trade, environmentalism, and development. Building from earlier and ongoing field work in Mozambique, Gambia, Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia, Little explores how local histories and political exchanges shape neoliberalism – here meaning Western political and economic ideas and policies – as it takes root in Africa. In Ethiopia, for example, an intriguing "liberal experiment" is unfolding, one in which the Ethiopian state has used some of the techniques of neoliberalism to open up the economy, but has maintained firm control of land and local organizations. In northern Kenya, on the other hand, neoliberal development has become closely tied to environmental activism. "The world is very interested in the environmental resources that these regions possess, and so local groups have used environmental platforms to advance local political agendas and resist dominant political discourses," says Little. Much is happening in Africa, he explains, that ordinary media stories have failed to capture – the mainstream media tends to focus on ethnic warfare ('tribalism'), corruption, and human disease. When completed, The Anthropology of Neoliberalism will offer a comprehensive, multi-sited study that will address some of Africa’s must compelling issues and problems but continue to privilege local stories and perspectives.

It's a demanding undertaking, but Little is up to the challenge. In the early 1980s, he became one of the first anthropologists to look extensively at the social aspects of environmental and food problems, publishing Lands at Risk in the Third World: Local-Level Perspectives (with M. Horowitz) in 1987 and The Elusive Granary: Herder, Farmer and State in Northern Kenya in 1992. These books were among the earliest attempts to define what is now known as political ecology and to apply it to particular cultural contexts. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he conducted fieldwork in the Somalia borderlands that built on earlier work in the area. Supported by a MacArthur Foundation grant, in 2003 he published Somalia: Economy without a State, in which he refuted the conventional wisdom that Somalia's economy deteriorated into chaos after the state's collapse in 1991. Little's research showed that, despite numerous difficulties posed by a stateless economy, certain sectors of Somali society – including pastoral communities – remained vibrant and dynamic. "The people showed incredible innovation," Little says. "They learned to develop a unique set of informal finance, trade, and banking institutions, in order to survive and make a living." His book won the Amaury Talbot Book Prize from the Royal Anthropological Institute (2004) and became a Choice Outstanding Academic Book the same year.

Throughout these and other projects, Little's interest in the relation between theory and practice in anthropological scholarship has remained constant. "I refuse to subscribe to the dichotomy between basic theoretical work and what is often called applied work or public scholarship," he says. As he joins the Emory faculty in January 2009, Little is eager to participate in an intellectual community with its own tradition of breaking down the divide between theory and practice. He hopes to play a role in the university's new initiatives in development studies, especially in Africa. He plans to teach both graduate and undergraduate courses on international development, environmental anthropology, and African societies and cultures. He also intends to continue collaborations with graduate students from African countries, and hopes that some will make their way to Emory to earn advanced degrees. "We are trying to extend knowledge in order to solve some of the most challenging problems in the world," he says. "That's why I came to Emory."

LINKS:
http://www.uky.edu/PR/News/Archives/2004/Sept2004/040930_little_anthropology.htm

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