George Mentore

The disciplinary effects of anthropology have gradually framed my research interests. They have done so as the hard-won legitimacies to speak and to write about the factors contributing to the presence of human society. The intellectual enclosure they have constructed reserves for me a site in which to study the peoples of Lowland South America and the Caribbean.

I first entered anthropology interested in the experiences from and the interpretations of ideology. I had been taught anthropology at the London School of Economics during a time when Structural-Marxism seemed the most likely theoretical paradigm to succeed. Today, perhaps with greater vigor, I animadvert more about the difference between observing and describing the lived experiences of individuals in society and interpreting these experiences through anthropology. Hence I have carried out research primarily on the symbolic meaning and power of body adornment, the alienation of creole speech, and the altruism of kinship relations. With my work on the Waiwai of southern Guyana, I have argued for an understanding of knowledge as somatic experience. With my material on Grenadian creole, I have configured the literate inscriptives of text and the expressive emotion of creole speech in their antagonistic settings. And, with Waiwai kinship, I have made problematic the altruistic social element in economic exchanges.

My theoretical concerns have been described as stemming from a subaltern consciousness. Yet, I intend neither to interrogate the scientific specificity of the anthropological project nor to perceive the inaccuracies of an occidental representation. Rather, I would like to site the structural limits of the project and, from there, move on to build on the achievements and possibilities of the discipline.

Specializations

Amerindian and Caribbean studies, the anthropology of knowledge, the anthropology of power, and the anthropology of emotion.

Courses

On Power and the Body; Amazonian People; Tournaments and Athletes: A Cross-cultural Study of Sport; Creole Narratives; Introduction to African and African-American Studies.

Selected Publications

• 2005 - Of Passionate Curves and Desirable Cadences: Themes on Waiwai Social Being. University of Nebraska Press.
• 2000 - Society, Body, and Style: An Archery Contest in an Amerindian Society in Games, Sports, and Cultures. ed., Noel Dyck. Oxford, Berg Press.
• 1999 - Notting Hill in Carnival in Visual Anthropology Review 15:1.
• 1993 - Tempering the Social Self: Body Adornment, Vital Substance, and Knowledge among the Waiwai. Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology 9:22-34.
• 1993 - Alienating Emotion: Literacy and Creolese in Grenada. Ethnic 10:269-284.

Click here for a Full Publication List