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Carolyn Rouse
Ritter Professor of Anthropology
crouse@princeton.edu
312 Aaron Burr Hall
Tuesday Zoom / WASE Friday in office Aaron Burr 312.
Teaching (Fall 2021)
The Anthropology of Development (ANT 314 / ENE 314 / AFS 314)
www.uncertainsuffering.com
New Interactive Webpage
TRUMPLANDIA
development, medical anthropology, visual anthropology, resistance, critical race theory, consciousness, North America, Ghana
Carolyn Rouse is a professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her work explores the use of evidence to make particular claims about race and social inequality. She is the author of Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam, Uncertain Suffering: Racial Healthcare Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease and Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment. Her manuscript Development Hubris: Adventures Trying to Save the World examines discourses of charity and development and is tied to her own project building a high school in a fishing village in Ghana. In the summer of 2016 she began studying declining white life expectancies in rural California as a follow-up to her research on racial health disparities. In addition to being an anthropologist, Rouse is also a filmmaker. She has produced, directed, and/or edited a number of documentaries including Chicks in White Satin (1994), Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali (1998), and Listening as a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Thought (2015). As an extension of her commitment and training in visual anthropology, in the summer of 2016 she created the Ethnographic Data Visualization Lab (VizE Lab) to work with students and colleagues on ways to visualize complex ethnographic data. One project she is currently working on through the lab brings together 60 years of biological data with 60 years of social scientific data to study epigenetic effects on physical development.
Her work on religion focuses on how authority in Islam is used to validate notions of racial equality and social justice. She explores these themes in her book Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam (2004), and Televised Redemption: The Media Production of Black Muslims, Jews, and Christians, co-written with John Jackson and Marla Frederick (manuscript). Below is a link to an interview she gave at the American Anthropological Association meetings on the subject: Click here to view interview.
Her other work on religion includes:
Rouse, Carolyn and Janet Hoskins. 2012. "Purity, Soul Food, and Sunni Islam: Explorations at the Intersection of Consumption and Resistance," In Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World.
Rouse, Carolyn. 2009. "Turning African-Americans into Rational Actors: The Important Legacy of Fauset's Functionalism," In Revisiting Black Gods of the Metropolis: African American Religions in the Twentieth Century.
Rouse, Carolyn. 2007. "Pious Muslim Bodies and Alternative Medicine: Continuities and Discontinuities Between the African Diaspora and an Emerging Gendered Diaspora." In Transforming Anthropology.
Rouse, Carolyn. 2006. "Shopping With Sister Zubayda: African American Sunni Muslim Rituals of Consumption and Belonging." In Women and Religion in the African Diaspora.
Her work in medicine explores how statistical evidence is used to make claims about health care and social justice. She focuses on uncertainties around what constitutes a racial health disparity, and the evidence-based research used to assert particular narratives of injustice and calls for reparations. Her work in this area includes Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease (2009), as well as the following articles and chapters:
Rouse, Carolyn. 2011. "Informing Choice or Teaching Submission to Medical Authority: A Case Study of Adolescent Transitioning for Sickle Cell Patients." Ethnicity and Health.
Rouse, Carolyn. 2010. "Patient and Practitioner Noncompliance: Rationing, Resistance, and the Missing Conversation." Anthropology and Medicine.
Rouse, Carolyn. 2007. "Crossing Borders: Kwaku Ohene-Frempong, M.D." In Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved.
Rouse, Carolyn. 2006. Jesica Speaks?: Adolescent Consent for Transplantation and Ethical Uncertainty. In Beyond the Bungled Transplant: Jesica Santillan and High-Tech Medicine in Cultural Perspective.
Rouse, Carolyn. 2004. "Paradigms and Politics: Shaping Health Care Access for Sickle Cell Patients Through the Discursive Regimes of Biomedicine." In Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.
Rouse, Carolyn. 2004. "If she's a vegetable, we'll be her garden: Embodiment, Transcendence, and Citations of Competing Metaphors in the Case of a Dying Child." American Ethnologist.
Development and Education
In 2008, Carolyn Rouse began building a high school in a fishing village at the western edge of Accra, Ghana. Her research focuses on the relationship between international development and social change in urban sub-Saharan Africa. Her manuscript Development Hubris: Adventures Trying to Save the World (under review) examines contemporary discourses of progress and social improvement through her experiences with Ghanaian law, violence, labor, and education. Her other work on the subject includes:
Rouse, Carolyn. 2014. "Don't Let the Lion Tell the Giraffe's Story: Ghana's Competing Security Narratives." In Biosecurity and Vulnerability.
Carolyn Rouse began her graduate career as a visual anthropologist. After taking a hiatus from filmmaking, she is now editing a non-MOOC/MOOC on World Anthropologies, shot in Cape Town South Africa in 2013.
Her other work includes:
Listening as a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Thought. Producer/Co-Director 2015
From Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali . Director/Producer, Video 1998 with Robert Lemelson.
Thisabled Lives: The Twenty-Year Collaboration of Diane DeVries and Gelya Frank. Interviewer/Editor, Video 1995.
Voices for Change: Women's Health Leadership Project . Director/Producer, Video 1995.
Tales from Arab Detroit: Abu Zaid Comes to America. Editor, Video 1994. Winner of the 1995 American Anthropological Association Award for Excellence.
From Black Face to My Face. Associate Producer, Video 1993. From Black Face to My Face with British comedian Lenny Henry.
Chicks in White Satin . Editor, Film 1992. Nominated for an Academy Award and winner of numerous awards.
Would You Know Me Any Better Without the Veil? Director/Editor, Film 1992.
'Talkin' 'bout droppin' out !. Associate Video Consultant, Video 1989 with Branda Miller.
Publications List:
2021 "Necropolitics vs. Biopolitics: Spatialization, White Privilege, and Visibility During a Pandemic." In Cultural Anthropology, 6(3):360-367.
2021 "Race and Existential Debt: How Race Complicates an Anthropologist's Sense of the Rules of Reciprocity." In Reciprocity Rules: Friendship and Compensation in Fieldwork Encounters, eds. Michelle C. Johnson and Edmund Q. S. Searles, New York: Lexington Books.
2020 "It's All Free Speech Until Someone Dies in a Pandemic." In Anthropology Now, 12:1(66-72).|
2019 "Voicing the Ancestors: Claude-Levi Strauss' Race and History." American Anthropologist.
2019 "Race, Inequality, and Social Justice," Companion to the Anthropology of Africa, eds. Roy Grinker, Stephen Lubkemann, Christopher Steiner, and Euclides Goncalves, Wiley-Blackwell.
2019 "Liberal Bias: The New 'Reverse Racism' in the Trump Era." American Anthropologist, Vol 121(1):172-176.
2018 "Evidence of What?: Recreating Race through Evidence-Based Approaches to Social Improvement." For Reconsidering Race, Eds. Suzuki Kazuko and Diego von Vacano, London: Oxford University Press.
2016 "Racial Health Disparities and Questions of Evidence: Assessing What Went Wrong with Healthy People 2010." In Comparing Approaches to Health Inequalities and Justice: A Dialogue on Theory, Methods, and (Inter)-Disciplinarity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Eds. Mara Buchbinder, Michelle Rivkin-Fish, and Rebecca Walker, pp. 259-284.
2014 "Don't Let the Lion Tell the Giraffe's Story: Ghana's Competing Security Narratives." In Biosecurity and Vulnerability. Eds. Nancy Chen and Lesley Sharp. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, pp. 121-142.
2014 "MOOCs and the Politics of Visual Boredom," In American Anthropologist, 116(4): 7-8.
2012 "Purity, Soul Food, and Sunni Islam: Explorations at the Intersection of Consumption and Resistance," In Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, Eds. Psyche Williams-Forson and Carole Counihan, New York: Routledge, pp, 175-194.
2009 "Eye of the Storm" Anthropology Now
2010 "Patient and Practitioner Noncompliance:Rationing, Resistance, and the Missing Conversation." Anthropology and Medicine special volume
2009. "Turning African-Americans into Rational Actors: The Important Legacy of Fauset's Functionalism," In Revisiting Black Gods of the Metropolis: African American Religions in the Twentieth Century
2008 "Nation of Islam," In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
2007 "Pious Muslim Bodies and Alternative Medicine: Continuities and Discontinuities Between the African Diaspora and an Emerging Gendered Diaspora." In Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 15,
Number 2, pp 111-124
2007 "Crossing Borders: Kwaku Ohene-Frempong, M.D." In Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. 18(1)
2006 Jesica Speaks?: Adolescent Consent for Transplantation and Ethical Uncertainty. In Beyond the Bungled Transplant: Jesica Santillan and High-Tech Medicine in Cultural Perspective
2006 "Shopping With Sister Zubayda: African American Sunni Muslim Rituals of Consumption and Belonging." In Women and Religion in the African Diaspora
2004 "Paradigms and Politics: Shaping Health Care Access for Sickle Cell Patients Through the Discursive Regimes of Biomedicine." In Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 28(3)
2004 "If she's a vegetable, we'll be her garden: Embodiment, Transcendence, and Citations of Competing Metaphors in the Case of a Dying Child." American Ethnologist 31(4). 514-529.
2004 "Purity, Soul Food, and Islam: Explorations at the Intersection of Consumption and Resistance." Cultural Anthropology, Volume 19, No. 2
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