Christopher Annear

Background

About Christopher Annear

I am an environmental and symbolic anthropologist with active programs of field research in South-Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Northeastern United States. I am interested in questions pertaining to how human communities adapt to variable ecological environments, and the relative effectiveness of development, management, and legislation of these areas. I am also beginning to explore questions of cuisine, nationhood, and citizenship. I plan to do so in Zambia, but this project may be trans-continental, between spaces in Southern Africa and East/Southeast Asia. In one recent publication, I, along with Professor of Sociology, Jack D. Harris, studied Vietnamese cookbooks in order to address the question of culinary scale in Vietnam. Is "Vietnamese cuisine" a national entity or are there a variety of discrete though related regional tastes and culinary practices that comprise what we may refer to as Vietnamese food? We found that there is tension to this cultural and political question-and that its uncertainty is productive to teaching students in study abroad programs. Concurrent research has focused on the relationship between an ethnically heterogeneous population and an ecologically dynamic fishery in South-Central Africa. I am particularly interested in how communities adapt to variable environments and the effectiveness of management and legislation of these areas. I study a multiethnic highly mobile population of fishers traders and farmers in northern Zambia and southern D.R. Congo. I examine how people living on this fishery maintain its sustainability as a shared natural resource; how external constraints such as laws governance and historical circumstances affect constituent behaviors and choices; and how this ecologically dynamic fishery constrains some human communities but politically endows others. Specialties: African Studies; Food Studies; Development; Zambia; Democratic Republic of Congo; Southern Africa; Central Africa; Vietnam; United States