P Redfield
Biographic Data
| ID | 24850 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P Redfield |
| GIVEN NAMES | P |
| FAMILY NAME | Redfield |
| SIGNATURE | REDFIELD P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4109-5758 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 544 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The pressure of waste: Technopolitical crisis, ecological imaginaries and toilet redesign in South Africa
On the humanitarian horizon
Commentary on “Explosiveness”: A sudden longue durée
Violent and sudden, explosions serve as reference points when they cleave worlds in two.The authors of this insightful and provocative article stress the wider spatial aspects of explosive impact, tracing arcs of destructive and determining force as they resonate through bodies in morgues and mines hidden in fields, redefining the territory of war in specific and concrete ways.To complement their work, I will emphasize the extended temporal quali…
Maroons in Guyane: Past, Present, Future , by Richard Price & Sally Price
Shacktopia: The Meantime Future of Humanitarian Design
English Abstract: How modest can a utopia be? I approach this question with reference to the iShack, a solar electrification project in South Africa designed as an incremental upgrade for shack dwellers in informal settlements. Designed to provide basic energy for lighting and charging, the system also promises health and safety benefits by reducing the use of kerosene. Its promoters envision it as a bridge solution while people wait for better h…
When we were modern
This essay situates Paul Rabinow’s work on modernist planning relative to the discipline of anthropology at the end of the 1980s, recalling the significance of treating modernity as an ethos
Clinic in Crisis Response: Imagined Immunities
An index of waste: Humanitarian design, “dignified living” and the politics of infrastructure in Cape Town
This article develops a framework for thinking about waste as an index that signals a relational position within contested, historically layered conceptions of human order. It follows two contrasting frameworks for thinking about sanitation infrastructure: a quest to redesign the toilet at a global level for underserved populations, and popular conceptions of rights, citizenship and dignity grounded in the materiality of infrastructure in post-ap…
Fluid technologies: The Bush Pump, the LifeStraw ® and microworlds of humanitarian design
Over the past decade, many ingenious, small-scale gadgets have appeared in response to problems of disaster and extreme poverty. Focusing on the LifeStraw, a water filtration device invented by the company Vestergaard Frandsen, I situate this wave of humanitarian design relative to Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol's classic article on the Zimbabwe Bush Pump. The LifeStraw shares the Bush Pump's principle of technical minimalism, as well as its …
The open question
The open question: Medical anthropology and open access
Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders
Life in Crisis tells the story of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders or MSF) and its effort to "save lives" on a global scale. Begun in 1971 as a French alternative to the Red Cross, the MSF has grown into an international institution with a reputation for outspoken protest as well as technical efficiency. It has also expanded beyond emergency response, providing for a wider range of endeavors, including AIDS care. Yet its seemingl…
Commentary: Eyes wide shut in transnational science and aid
Responding to the problem of unknowing in the contemporary pursuit of knowledge, my commentary on Wenzel Geissler's article extends its themes to a parallel, overlapping domain of humanitarianism. The provision of medical aid shares the preference of research trials for an egalitarian style and similarly avoids recognizing the very inequities that structure its relations. The humanitarian embrace of exception and moral discourse likewise parallel…
Bioexpectations: Life Technologies as Humanitarian Goods
Expectations that people should live—even under extreme conditions of crisis, neglect, and poverty—now combine with doubts about the capacity of states to provide for their populations. One result has been a set of technologies built around minimalist forms of care. Created by a heterogeneous movement of corporations as well as nonprofit organizations, they attempt to respond to poverty and disaster through ethical design
The Unbearable Lightness of Ex-Pats: Double Binds of Humanitarian Mobility
This article addresses legacies of national origin within global forms. Focusing on tensions related to human resources, I consider the case of the humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders). Since 1971, MSF has grown into a large, transnational NGO sponsoring a variety of medical projects worldwide. Amid recent efforts to "decolonize" its human profile, MSF has debated the appropriate role, motivation an…
A Modest Map of the Aid World
Ellen Lutz is contributing editor of Human Rights Forum, the AAA Committee for Human Rights column in Anthropology News
Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (review)
Reviewed by: Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century Peter Redfield (bio) Carolyn Nordstrom , Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 293 pp. with index, ISBN 0520239776 (cloth) 0520242416 (pbk.). Countless dispatches, novels and memoirs reveal the personal experience of war to be deeply chaotic. …
A less modest witness
In this article, I examine the evolving tradition of témoignage (witnessing) maintained by the international humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières-Doctors Without Borders. Comparing this practice to traditions of virtuous testimony by the public intellectual and the gentleman scientist, I suggest that collective actors like nongovernmental organizations now play a central role in defining secular moral truth for an international audi…
Foucault in the Tropics: Displacing the Panopticon
Doctors, Borders and Ethics of Crisis
Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis
The politics of life and death is explored from the perspective of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans frontières [MSF]), an activist nongovernmental organization explicitly founded to respond to health crises on a global scale. Following the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, I underline key intersections between MSF's operations that express concern for human life in the midst of humanitarian disaster and the group's self-proclaime…
The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space
This paper addresses an intersection between postcolonial studies and science studies, examining the greater colonial context of space exploration. In response to Chakrabarty’s call to ‘provincialize Europe’, I ask what it might mean to ‘provincialize’ outer space, considering locality relative to extra-planetary distance, and the asymmetries of history next to the symmetrical methodology advocated by Latour. By way of a brief reading of fictiona…
The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space
Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana
Rockets roar into space--bearing roughly half the world's commercial satellites--from the same South American coastal rainforest where convicts once did time on infamous Devil's Island. What makes Space in the Tropics enthralling is anthropologist Peter Redfield's ability to draw from these two disparate European projects in French Guiana a gleaming web of ideas about the intersections of nature and culture. In comparing the Franco-European Arian…
Space in the TropicsFrom Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana
Rockets roar into space—bearing roughly half the world's commercial satellites—from the same South American coastal rainforest where convicts once did time on infamous Devil's Island. This book draws from these two disparate European projects in French Guiana a web of ideas about the intersections of nature and culture. In comparing the Franco-European Ariane rocket program with the earlier penal experiment, the author connects the myth of Robins…
Vanity Yes, Pernicious Maybe
Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis
The politics of life and death is explored from the perspective of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans frontières [MSF]), an activist nongovernmental organization explicitly founded to respond to health crises on a global scale. Following the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, I underline key intersections between MSF's operations that express concern for human life in the midst of humanitarian disaster and the group's self-proclaime…
The Unbearable Lightness of Ex-Pats: Double Binds of Humanitarian Mobility
This article addresses legacies of national origin within global forms. Focusing on tensions related to human resources, I consider the case of the humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders). Since 1971, MSF has grown into a large, transnational NGO sponsoring a variety of medical projects worldwide. Amid recent efforts to "decolonize" its human profile, MSF has debated the appropriate role, motivation an…
A less modest witness
In this article, I examine the evolving tradition of témoignage (witnessing) maintained by the international humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières-Doctors Without Borders. Comparing this practice to traditions of virtuous testimony by the public intellectual and the gentleman scientist, I suggest that collective actors like nongovernmental organizations now play a central role in defining secular moral truth for an international audi…
Fluid technologies: The Bush Pump, the LifeStraw ® and microworlds of humanitarian design
Over the past decade, many ingenious, small-scale gadgets have appeared in response to problems of disaster and extreme poverty. Focusing on the LifeStraw, a water filtration device invented by the company Vestergaard Frandsen, I situate this wave of humanitarian design relative to Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol's classic article on the Zimbabwe Bush Pump. The LifeStraw shares the Bush Pump's principle of technical minimalism, as well as its …
Bioexpectations: Life Technologies as Humanitarian Goods
Expectations that people should live—even under extreme conditions of crisis, neglect, and poverty—now combine with doubts about the capacity of states to provide for their populations. One result has been a set of technologies built around minimalist forms of care. Created by a heterogeneous movement of corporations as well as nonprofit organizations, they attempt to respond to poverty and disaster through ethical design
The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space
This paper addresses an intersection between postcolonial studies and science studies, examining the greater colonial context of space exploration. In response to Chakrabarty’s call to ‘provincialize Europe’, I ask what it might mean to ‘provincialize’ outer space, considering locality relative to extra-planetary distance, and the asymmetries of history next to the symmetrical methodology advocated by Latour. By way of a brief reading of fictiona…
An index of waste: Humanitarian design, “dignified living” and the politics of infrastructure in Cape Town
This article develops a framework for thinking about waste as an index that signals a relational position within contested, historically layered conceptions of human order. It follows two contrasting frameworks for thinking about sanitation infrastructure: a quest to redesign the toilet at a global level for underserved populations, and popular conceptions of rights, citizenship and dignity grounded in the materiality of infrastructure in post-ap…
Shacktopia: The Meantime Future of Humanitarian Design
English Abstract: How modest can a utopia be? I approach this question with reference to the iShack, a solar electrification project in South Africa designed as an incremental upgrade for shack dwellers in informal settlements. Designed to provide basic energy for lighting and charging, the system also promises health and safety benefits by reducing the use of kerosene. Its promoters envision it as a bridge solution while people wait for better h…
Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and Its Place on the Ground
In delineating a trajectory of human history, anthropology and other social sciences have tended to describe traditional life in particular geographic terms while leaving modem experience universal in scope. Studies of science and technology, while helping to locate and describe centers of modern practice, have less frequently explored their edges. Using a case study of the location of the primary French/European space launch site in French Guian…
The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space
Commentary: Eyes wide shut in transnational science and aid
Responding to the problem of unknowing in the contemporary pursuit of knowledge, my commentary on Wenzel Geissler's article extends its themes to a parallel, overlapping domain of humanitarianism. The provision of medical aid shares the preference of research trials for an egalitarian style and similarly avoids recognizing the very inequities that structure its relations. The humanitarian embrace of exception and moral discourse likewise parallel…
Clinic in Crisis Response: Imagined Immunities
The pressure of waste: Technopolitical crisis, ecological imaginaries and toilet redesign in South Africa
Remembering the Revolution Forgetting the Empire: Notes after the French Bicentennial
Beneath a Modern Sky: Space Technology and Its Place on the Ground
In delineating a trajectory of human history, anthropology and other social sciences have tended to describe traditional life in particular geographic terms while leaving modem experience universal in scope. Studies of science and technology, while helping to locate and describe centers of modern practice, have less frequently explored their edges. Using a case study of the location of the primary French/European space launch site in French Guian…
Vanity Yes, Pernicious Maybe
Space in the TropicsFrom Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana
Rockets roar into space—bearing roughly half the world's commercial satellites—from the same South American coastal rainforest where convicts once did time on infamous Devil's Island. This book draws from these two disparate European projects in French Guiana a web of ideas about the intersections of nature and culture. In comparing the Franco-European Ariane rocket program with the earlier penal experiment, the author connects the myth of Robins…
The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space
This paper addresses an intersection between postcolonial studies and science studies, examining the greater colonial context of space exploration. In response to Chakrabarty’s call to ‘provincialize Europe’, I ask what it might mean to ‘provincialize’ outer space, considering locality relative to extra-planetary distance, and the asymmetries of history next to the symmetrical methodology advocated by Latour. By way of a brief reading of fictiona…
The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space
Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana
Rockets roar into space--bearing roughly half the world's commercial satellites--from the same South American coastal rainforest where convicts once did time on infamous Devil's Island. What makes Space in the Tropics enthralling is anthropologist Peter Redfield's ability to draw from these two disparate European projects in French Guiana a gleaming web of ideas about the intersections of nature and culture. In comparing the Franco-European Arian…
Foucault in the Tropics: Displacing the Panopticon
Doctors, Borders and Ethics of Crisis
Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis
The politics of life and death is explored from the perspective of Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans frontières [MSF]), an activist nongovernmental organization explicitly founded to respond to health crises on a global scale. Following the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, I underline key intersections between MSF's operations that express concern for human life in the midst of humanitarian disaster and the group's self-proclaime…
A less modest witness
In this article, I examine the evolving tradition of témoignage (witnessing) maintained by the international humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières-Doctors Without Borders. Comparing this practice to traditions of virtuous testimony by the public intellectual and the gentleman scientist, I suggest that collective actors like nongovernmental organizations now play a central role in defining secular moral truth for an international audi…
Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (review)
Reviewed by: Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century Peter Redfield (bio) Carolyn Nordstrom , Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 293 pp. with index, ISBN 0520239776 (cloth) 0520242416 (pbk.). Countless dispatches, novels and memoirs reveal the personal experience of war to be deeply chaotic. …
A Modest Map of the Aid World
Ellen Lutz is contributing editor of Human Rights Forum, the AAA Committee for Human Rights column in Anthropology News
Bioexpectations: Life Technologies as Humanitarian Goods
Expectations that people should live—even under extreme conditions of crisis, neglect, and poverty—now combine with doubts about the capacity of states to provide for their populations. One result has been a set of technologies built around minimalist forms of care. Created by a heterogeneous movement of corporations as well as nonprofit organizations, they attempt to respond to poverty and disaster through ethical design
The Unbearable Lightness of Ex-Pats: Double Binds of Humanitarian Mobility
This article addresses legacies of national origin within global forms. Focusing on tensions related to human resources, I consider the case of the humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders). Since 1971, MSF has grown into a large, transnational NGO sponsoring a variety of medical projects worldwide. Amid recent efforts to "decolonize" its human profile, MSF has debated the appropriate role, motivation an…
Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders
Life in Crisis tells the story of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders or MSF) and its effort to "save lives" on a global scale. Begun in 1971 as a French alternative to the Red Cross, the MSF has grown into an international institution with a reputation for outspoken protest as well as technical efficiency. It has also expanded beyond emergency response, providing for a wider range of endeavors, including AIDS care. Yet its seemingl…
Commentary: Eyes wide shut in transnational science and aid
Responding to the problem of unknowing in the contemporary pursuit of knowledge, my commentary on Wenzel Geissler's article extends its themes to a parallel, overlapping domain of humanitarianism. The provision of medical aid shares the preference of research trials for an egalitarian style and similarly avoids recognizing the very inequities that structure its relations. The humanitarian embrace of exception and moral discourse likewise parallel…
Fluid technologies: The Bush Pump, the LifeStraw ® and microworlds of humanitarian design
Over the past decade, many ingenious, small-scale gadgets have appeared in response to problems of disaster and extreme poverty. Focusing on the LifeStraw, a water filtration device invented by the company Vestergaard Frandsen, I situate this wave of humanitarian design relative to Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol's classic article on the Zimbabwe Bush Pump. The LifeStraw shares the Bush Pump's principle of technical minimalism, as well as its …
The open question
The open question: Medical anthropology and open access
Clinic in Crisis Response: Imagined Immunities
An index of waste: Humanitarian design, “dignified living” and the politics of infrastructure in Cape Town
This article develops a framework for thinking about waste as an index that signals a relational position within contested, historically layered conceptions of human order. It follows two contrasting frameworks for thinking about sanitation infrastructure: a quest to redesign the toilet at a global level for underserved populations, and popular conceptions of rights, citizenship and dignity grounded in the materiality of infrastructure in post-ap…
When we were modern
This essay situates Paul Rabinow’s work on modernist planning relative to the discipline of anthropology at the end of the 1980s, recalling the significance of treating modernity as an ethos
Shacktopia: The Meantime Future of Humanitarian Design
English Abstract: How modest can a utopia be? I approach this question with reference to the iShack, a solar electrification project in South Africa designed as an incremental upgrade for shack dwellers in informal settlements. Designed to provide basic energy for lighting and charging, the system also promises health and safety benefits by reducing the use of kerosene. Its promoters envision it as a bridge solution while people wait for better h…
Commentary on “Explosiveness”: A sudden longue durée
Violent and sudden, explosions serve as reference points when they cleave worlds in two.The authors of this insightful and provocative article stress the wider spatial aspects of explosive impact, tracing arcs of destructive and determining force as they resonate through bodies in morgues and mines hidden in fields, redefining the territory of war in specific and concrete ways.To complement their work, I will emphasize the extended temporal quali…
Maroons in Guyane: Past, Present, Future , by Richard Price & Sally Price
Political science (14 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · History (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Environmental ethics (6 works) · Geography (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)