Journal of Anthropology Reports

James Lorand Matory

James Lorand Matory
Professor, Department of Cultural Anthropology
Duke University, Durham, USA

Biography

I am currently at work on an online museum exhibition, which is tentatively called "The Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic.”  It concerns the international capitalist context and the industrial materials that have shaped the transformation of Yoruba sacred art over the centuries amid its trans-Atlantic expansion.  So far, we have organized, professionally photographed, and begun the uploading of brief descriptions, measurements, and catalogue numbers for approximately 1000 items in a collection that I have assembled over the past 35 years.
Eventually, I plan to write an ethnography of a white supremacist group in the United States.  This book will test my skills as a field researcher and as a scientist committed to the careful documentation of local points of view and to their fair-minded social contextualization.

Research Interest

Cultural Anthropology
Archeology
Human societies