Parker Shipton is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Research Fellow in African Studies, Boston University. His current and continuing interests include economic, legal, and symbolic anthropology and the history of social studies. Topics of his research, teaching, and writing have included agriculture, food, and hunger; credit and debt; land rights, attachment, and belonging; kinship and fictive kinship; ritual and sequencing; human rights; and the human classification and treatment of other animals.
Shipton earned his university degrees at Cornell (A.B. summa cum laude), Oxford (M.Litt.), and Cambridge (Ph.D.) He has taught at Harvard University and held visiting appointments at the University of Virginia and Yale University; and at the University of Nairobi, Kenya; University of Padua, Italy; and Waseda University, Japan.
A former Marshall Scholar, Shipton has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from scholarly organizations including the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, among others. He has also served as a researcher for various international aid organizations. He is a former president of the Association for Africanist Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association.
He has conducted most of his field research in equatorial East Africa (especially among Luo speakers and others in agrarian western Kenya) and in West Africa (especially among farming Mandinka-speakers and agro-pastoralist Fula-speakers in the Gambia); and carried out other research or study in Andean Colombia, in urban northern Italy and western France, and among native people of central Mexico and the North Pacific Coast of North America.
His research and writing have been awarded distinctions including the Curl Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and (in 2008, for his book The Nature of Entrustment), the Melville J. Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association.
Contact:
Department of Anthropology, Boston University, 232 Bay State Road, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA. Tel. (+01) 617-353-8904, fax 617-353-2610
African Studies Center, Boston University, 270 Bay State Road, Boston, Massachusetts, 02215, USA. Tel. (+01) 617-353-3673, fax 617-353-4975
e-mail <shipton@bu.edu>
Selected Publications:
Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009.
The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in Africa. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.
"Legalism and Loyalism: European, African, and Human 'Rights.’” In Bartholomew Dean and Jerome Levi, eds., At the Risk of Being Heard: Identity, Indigenous Rights, and Postcolonial States, pp. 45-79. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
"African Famines: Untangling the Human Roots” (Ellen Messer and Parker Shipton). In Jeremy MacClancy, ed., Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines, pp. 227-250. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
"Rural Credit and Savings.” (P. McNamara and P. M. Shipton). In Malcolm McPherson and Steven Radelet, eds., Economic Recovery in The Gambia: Lessons for Africa, pp. 95-110. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1996.
"Luo Entrustment: Foreign Finance and the Soil of the Spirits in Kenya." Africa, Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 65(2): 165-196, 1995.
"How Gambians Save: Culture and Economy at an Ethnic Crossroads." In Jane I. Guyer, ed., Money Matters: Instability and Values in West and Equatorial Africa, pp. 245-276. Portsmouth, N.H. and London: Heinemann and James Currey, 1995.
"Time and Money in the Western Sahel: A Clash of Cultures in Gambian Rural Finance" (republished, re-edited). In James Acheson, ed., Anthropology and Institutional Economics, pp. 283-327. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, for the Society for Economic Anthropology, 1994.
"Land and Culture in Tropical Africa: Soils, Symbols, and the Metaphysics of the Mundane." Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 23, 1994, pp. 347-77.
Rights Over Land: Categories and Controversies (Mitzi Goheen and Parker Shipton, guest eds.) Special issue of Africa, Journal of the International African Institute. Vol. 62, no. 3, 1992.
"Debts and Trespasses: Land, Mortgages, and the Ancestors in Western Kenya." In M. Goheen and P. Shipton, guest eds., Rights over Land: Categories and Controversies. Special issue of Africa, Journal of the International African Institute. Vol. 62, no. 3, 1992. 357-88.
Introduction: "Understanding African Land-holding: Power, Wealth, and Meaning." (P. Shipton and M. Goheen). In M. Goheen and P. Shipton, guest eds., Rights over Land: Categories and Controversies. Special Issue, Africa, Journal of the International African Institute. Vol. 62, no. 3, 1992. 307-25.
"African Famines and Food Security: Anthropological Perspectives." Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 19, 1990, pp. 353-394.
Bitter Money: Cultural Economy and Some African Meanings of Forbidden Commodities. American Ethnological Society Monograph 1. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1989.
Seeking Solutions: Framework and Cases for Small Enterprise Development Programs (Charles K. Mann, Merilee S. Grindle, and Parker Shipton, eds.). West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1989. (For practitioner readership.)
"The Kenyan Land Tenure Reform: Misunderstandings in the Public Creation of Private Property." In R.E. Downs and S.P. Reyna, eds., Land and Society in Contemporary Africa, pages 91-135. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988.
"Strips and Patches: A Demographic Dimension in Some African Landholding and Political Systems." Man, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (New Series), Vol. 19, December, 1984, pp. 613-634. (Curl Prize Essay).
Book Series Editing:
Series Editor of the Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural Anthropology,
and of Peoples of Africa (books in archaeology, history, and social and cultural anthropology). Both at Blackwell Publishing, Oxford U.K. and Malden, Massachusetts (from 2007, Wiley-Blackwell).