James Pritchett, Michigan State University
Department of Anthropology
Professor
East Lansing, Michigan
pritch41@msu.edu
Office:
(517) 353-1700
Bio/Research
James A. Pritchett is Director of the MSU African Studies Center and Professor of Anthropology. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1990, having completed a re-study of the Lunda-Ndembu people on the Central African Plateau, first studied by Victor Turner in the early 1950s. Pr...
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Bio/Research
James A. Pritchett is Director of the MSU African Studies Center and Professor of Anthropology. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1990, having completed a re-study of the Lunda-Ndembu people on the Central African Plateau, first studied by Victor Turner in the early 1950s. Pritchett’s work is concerned with the interaction between tradition and modernity in contemporary Africa, particularly the ways in which social change is interpreted and validated according to local belief systems. He is the author of Lunda-Ndembu: Style, Change and Social Transformation in South Central Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), and Friends for Life, Friends for Death: Cohorts and Consciousness among the Lunda-Ndembu (University of Virginia Press, 2007). He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association and a member of the Board of Advisors of the International Consortium for Law and Development. He has served as a Research Officer at the University of Zambia, and has conducted fieldwork there, and in Angola and Congo since 1982. Professor Pritchett also has a strong interest in the African Diaspora, and has studied communities of African-descended people in the Caribbean, Brazil and elsewhere in Central and South America.
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