Ilana Gershon
Assistant Professor of Communication and Culture
Website: http://mypage.iu.edu/~igershon/
Professor Gershon received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2001. She writes and teaches about anthropology of democracy, indigenous self-representation, specifically Maori politicians and Samoan migrants; diaspora; U.S. ethnic formations; globalization; migration; kinship; anthropology of knowledge, ignorance, empathy, reflexivity; Oceania, New Zealand, United States.
Representative publications include the following:
- “Becoming Minor Minorities in the United States and New Zealand: Samoan Migrant Experiences with Government Funding.” Selected Papers on Refugees and Immigrants. Ed. MaryCarol Hopkins and Nancy Wellmeier. American Anthropological Association, 2001.
- “Going Nuclear: New Zealand Bureacratic Fantasies of Samoan Extended Families” New Directions in Anthropological Kinship. Ed. Linda Stone. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001.
- “How to Know When Not to Know: Strategic Ignorance When Eliciting for Samoan Migrant Exchanges.” Social Analysis 44 (2000).
- “Seeing Like A System: Luhmann For Anthropologist." Anthropological Theory 5 (2005).
- “When Culture Is Not A System: Shy Samoan Culture Brokers Can Not Do Their Job." Ethnos (forthcoming)