Paul Nadasdy

Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University, 2001
Associate Professor of Anthropology
At UW-Madison since 2000

Cultural Anthropology

Joint Appointment: American Indian Studies

Affiliations: Program in Science and Technology Studies

Research

I have been conducting ethnographic research in Canada's Yukon Territory since 1995.   My current project is an analysis of the socio-cultural dimensions of land claim negotiations among the governments of Canada, the Yukon Territory, and the people of Kluane First Nation, the aboriginal inhabitants of the southwest Yukon.   On the surface, these negotiations seem to be straightforward discussions aimed at determining rights to land and resources.   In practice, however, they entail a struggle that is as much over cultural meanings, symbols, and processes as it is over land and resources.   Government and aboriginal negotiators often have very different ideas about everything from how negotiations should be structured to the meanings of seemingly agreed-upon terms such as "land," "wildlife," and "heritage."   By examining the different cultural assumptions that various participants in the land claims process brought to the negotiating table, the resulting cross-cultural interactions, and how these articulated with the broader political, historical and legal contexts in which the negotiations are embedded, I hope to understand and describe the micro-level mechanisms through which unequal power relations are realized, reinforced, and at times subverted.

Teaching

Anth 300 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology:
Theory and Ethnography
Anth/AIS 314 North American Indians
Anth/AIS 317 Peoples and Cultures of the Arctic
Anth 470 Ecological Anthropology
Anth/AIS 676 North American Indian Lands and Sovereignties
Anth 900 Fundamentals of Anthropological Theory
Anth 909 Research Design and Research Methods
Anth 940 Problems in Cultural Anthropology:
The Anthropology of Science/Knowledge
Anth 940 Problems in Cultural Anthropology:
Concepts and Categories in Anthropology

Select Publications

• Nadasdy, Paul (2003)
  Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest   Yukon. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
• Nadasdy, Paul (2005)
  The Anti-Politics of TEK: The Institutionalization of Co-management Discourse and Practice.   Anthropologica 47(2): 215-232.
• Nadasdy, Paul (2005)
  Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism. Ethnohistory 52(2): 291-331.
• Nadasdy, Paul (2002)
  "Property" and Aboriginal Land Claims in the Canadian Subarctic: Some Theoretical Considerations. American Anthropologist 104(1): 247-261 .
• Nadasdy, Paul (1999)
  The Politics of TEK: Power and the 'Integration' of Knowledge." Arctic Anthropology 36(1-2): 1-18 (Republished in Natural Resources and Aboriginal People in Canada: Readings, Cases and Commentary . R. Bone and R. Anderson, eds. York, Ontario: Captus Press, 2003 ).

Curriculum Vitae

Paul Nadasdy CV

Contact

Office: 5438 Sewell Social Science Bldg.
Office phone: (608) 262-2187
Email address: penadasdy@wisc.edu