About the School
School Staff
Research
Seminar & Lecture Series
Current & Recent News
Associated Research Centres
 
Glenn Bowman
Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, Convenor of the MA in Ethnicity, Nationalism and Identity and the MA in Social Anthropology, and Director of Graduate Studies (Anthropology)

Glenn Bowman studied comparative literature, folklore and folklife, and critical theory in the United States before coming to Oxford in the late seventies to work under Edwin Ardener and Michael Gilsenan at the Institute of Social Anthropology in Oxford. His doctoral field research was carried out on the topic of Christian pilgrimage in Jerusalem between 1983 and 1985 and gave rise to further regionally based interests in shrines, monumentalisation, tourism and - with reference to the Palestinian people - nationalism and conflict, diasporic and local identities, and secularist versus sectarian strategies of mobilisation. He has subsequently carried out a longitudinal study of the mixed Christian-Muslim town of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, which had played a substantial role in the Palestinian intifada (uprising). At present he is continuing his work in Beit Sahour as well as developing work on 'comparative walling' building on his study of the genealogy and impact of the Israeli 'separation barrier'. He continues to develop comparative work between the Middle East and the Balkans, manifest in 'Constitutive Violence and the Nationalist Imaginary' (below), and is currently completing work on a project investigating historical and contemporary uses of shared shrines in Western Macedonia, Kosova and Albania and in Israel/Palestine.

Bowman taught in the Anthropology Department at University College London before coming to Kent in 1991 to join in starting up an interdisciplinary programme (Communications and Image Studies) concerned with issues of representation and its social and cultural contexts. When that programme terminated in 1998, he formally joined the Anthropology Department. Here he has launched the MA programme in the Anthropology of Ethnicity, Nationalism and Identity and co-convened the MA in Visual Anthropology.

Bowman is past Honorary Editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and is on the editorial boards of Critique of Anthropology, Anthropological Theory and Focaal.
Recent Publications
At Home Abroad: the Field Site as Second Home, Ethnologia Europaea. Vol. XXXVII: 1-2. pp. 140-148. April 2008. (pdf file)

Paranoia and the Gaze of the Self That Is Other
Catalogue Entry for the Exhibition Paranoia at the Freud Museum, London 2007. (pdf file)

Viewing the Holy City: An Anthropological Perspectivalism, Jerusalem Quarterly. Vol. XXXI. Summer 2007. pp. 27-39. (pdf file)

Israel's Wall and the Logic of Encystation, Focaal 50. December 2007. pp. 127-136. (pdf file)

Constitutive Violence and the Nationalist Imaginary: Antagonism And Defensive Solidarity in 'Palestine' and 'Former Yugoslavia' in Social Anthropology (Journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists). XI:3. December 2003. pp 37-58. (pdf file)

Beyond Othering: Comments on John Borneman's 'Is the United States Europe's Other' in American Ethnologist. Vol. XXX, no. 4. Nov. 2003. pp. 500-501. (pdf file)

'Migrant Labour': Constructing Homeland in the Exilic Imagination in Anthropological Theory. II: 4. December 2002. pp. 447-468. (pdf file)

An interview with Glenn Bowman from the Visualising Ethnography website (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ss/visualising_ethnography/) (pdf file)

Commentary on Robert Hayden's "Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in South Asia and the Balkans" in Current Anthropology. XLIII:2. April 2002. 219-220. (pdf file)

The (Imagined) Diaries of One Who Disappeared in Blackout, ed. Alona Pardo. Belgrade: Museum of Contemporary Art. November 2003. pp. 4-15. (pdf file)

Thinking the Unthinkable: Meditations on the Events of 11 September 2001 in Anthropology Today. XVII:6. December 2001. pp. 17-19. (pdf file)

A Textual Landscape: the Mapping of a Holy Land in the Fourth-Century Itinerarium of the Bordeaux Pilgrim in Unfolding the Orient: Travellers in Egypt and the Near East. (eds) Paul Starkey & Janet Starkey. Reading: Ithaca Press. 2001. 7-40

The Two Deaths of Basem Rishmawi: Identity Constructions and Reconstructions in a Muslim-Christian Palestinian Community in Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. March 2001. VIII:1. pp. 47-81. (pdf file)

'The Violence in Identity' in Anthropology of Violence and Conflict (eds Bettina Schmidt & Ingo Schroeder). London: Routledge. 2001. pp. 25-46. (pdf file)

'Christian Ideology and the Image of a Holy Land: The Place of Jerusalem Pilgrimage in the Various Christianities' in Contesting the Sacred: the Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (eds. Michael Sallnow and John Eade). New Edition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2000. 98-121. (pdf file)

'Radical Empiricism: Anthropological Fieldwork after Psychoanalysis and the Année Sociologique'
in Anthropological Journal on European Cultures. VI: 2 ('Reflecting Cultural Practice'). Frankfurt, GDR.. March 1998. ISSN 0960 0604 pp. 79-107 and forthcoming in German in Freud and Culture Now (Series IFK Materialien), ed. Marie-Luise Angerer and Henry Krips. Vienna: Viennese Böhlau Verlag. 1999. (pdf file)

'Mapping History's Redemption: Eschatology and Topography in the Itinerarium Burdigalense' in Jerusalem: its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (ed. Lee. I. Levine). New York & Jerusalem: Continuum Press and Magness Press. 1998. pp163-187 (pdf file)

'Identifying versus Identifying With 'the Other': reflections on the siting of the subject in anthropological discourse' in After Writing Culture: Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology (ASA Monographs 34). (ed. Allison James, Jenny Hockey and Andrew Dawson). London: Routledge. 1997. pp. 34-50. ISBN 0-415-15005-1 and 0-415-15006-X. (pdf file)

'Passion, Power and Politics in a Palestinian Tourist Market' in The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth Making in Tourism. (ed. Tom Selwyn). New York and London: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. March 1996. pp. 83-103 (pdf file)

'Xenophobia, Fantasy and the Nation: The Logic of Ethnic Violence in Former Yugoslavia' in Anthropology of Europe: Identity and Boundaries in Conflict . (ed. Victoria Goddard, Josep Llobera and Chris Shore). London: Berg. 1994. pp. 143-171 (html file)

"'A Country of Words': Conceiving the Palestinian Nation from the Position of Exile" in The Making of Political Identities. (ed. Ernesto Laclau). London: Verso. 1994. pp. 138-70 (pdf file)

'Nationalising the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-Occupied Territories' in Man: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. XXVIII:3. Sept. 1993. pp. 431-460. ISSN 0025-1496 (pdf file)

'The Politics of Tour Guiding: Israeli and Palestinian Guides in Israel and the Occupied Territories'(1) in Tourism and the Less-Developed Countries .(ed. David Harrison). London: Belhaven Press.1991. pp. 121-134 (pdf file)

Last Updated: 03/12/09
    Top