Department seminar: George Paul Meiu

Dr. George Paul Meiu is John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His research and teaching focus on sexuality, gender, and kinship; belonging, citizenship and the state; race and ethnicity; and the political economy of postcolonial Africa. In his book, Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Meiu explores how the tourist commodification of ethnic sexuality shapes collective attachments and relations of age, gender, and kinship in Kenya. Combining ethnographic and historical methods and exploring ritual, politics, and everyday life, he investigates how young Samburu men perform their ethnic identity through colonial images of the "primitive," sexual warrior, in order to initiate intimate relationships with European women, acquire wealth, and build futures.

Currently, Meiu is working on a second book, entitled Queer Objects of Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in an African Nation, to address a growing trend, in Kenya, that involves political and religious leaders, non-governmental organizations, and the citizenry in securing collective morality from the so-called “perversions of globalization.” Exploring panics over various objects deemed troublesome, Meiu proposes approaches sexual citizenship in relation to pollution, materiality, sociality, desire, and fear. His work appeared in the American Ethnologist, Ethnos, Anthropology Today, the Canadian Journal of African Studies, and in edited volumes on tourism, sexuality, and the history of anthropology.

Light refreshments will be served in the Corner Room after the talk. All interested are welcome!