FREDERICK K. ERRINGTON

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus
Anthropology Department
Trinity College
Hartford, CT 06106
Phone: (413) 253-9619
E-mail: frederick.errington@trincoll.edu

EDUCATION

1962        B.A. in Anthropology, with high honors and distinction, Wesleyan University.

1970        Ph.D. in Anthropology, Cornell University.

FELLOWSHIPS:

1958-62      Wesleyan Alumni Fellowshi

1962-63      Woodrow Wilson Fellowship

1964-66      National Institute of Health Traineeship

1966-67      Herbert Lehman Fellowship

1967-70      National Institute of Mental Health Predoctoral Research Fellowship of $16,000

1972         Miner D. Crary Fellowship of $3,000

1987-88      American Council of Learned Societies Research Grant of $3,000

1987-88      National Endowment for the Humanities Interpretative Research Grant of $65,000
(With Deborah Gewertz.)

1991-92      Mount Holyoke College Faculty Research Grant of  $11,900.

1991-92      American Council of Learned Societies Research Grant of $3,000.

1995-95      Fulbright nominee:  Congress cut funding of the program.

1995-96      Trinity College Faculty Research Leave Grant (declined).

1995-96      N.S.F. Research Grant of $91,700 (With Deborah Gewertz.)

2000         Trinity College Faculty Research Leave Grant.

2006        American Council of Learned Societies Senior Research Grant of $50,000.

2006        N.S.F. Research Grant of $99,961 (With Deborah Gewertz.)

HONORARY SOCIETIES

Phi Beta Kappa

Phi Kappa Phi

RECENT EMPLOYMENT

1992-01      Charles A. Dana Professor of Anthropology, Trinity College

2001-09       Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Trinity College.

2005        Professor, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, summer appointment

2006        Visiting Fellow, University of Auckland

2009-       Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Trinity College

FIELD RESEARCH

Fieldwork on Karavar in the Duke of York Islands of Papua New Guinea, during 1968, the summer of 1972 and between June, 1991 and October, 1991, on cargo cults, men’s ritual societies political change and the meanings of money.

 

Fieldwork among the Minangkabau in West Sumatra, Indonesia from January through July, 1975, on the social context of consciousness.

 

Fieldwork in Red Lodge, Montana, during the summers of 1980-1982, 1985-1986, 1988-1989, 1992 and 1995 on the construction of meaning and the creation of social order in ethnically diverse contemporary societies.

 

Fieldwork among the Chambri of the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea from December-February, 1983, on sociopolitical change and the meaning of power; between July, l987- January, 1988, on ethnohistory, nationalism and aesthetics; between June-August, 1994, on tourism and the nature of culture; between January-August, 1996, on the development of class and the formation of national cultural identity; and during June, 1999 on social change and personal loss.

 

Fieldwork at Booker Tate, a multinational agricultural advisory firm, located near Oxford, England, on its global strategies and on its Papua New Guinea operations,  June-July, 1998;  August 2002.

 

Fieldwork at Ramu Sugar Limited, a Papua New Guinea sugar plantation in the Madang Province, from July-August, 1999, during 2000 and from June-August, 2001 on social history.

 

Fieldwork among meat processors, importers, exporters, and consumers in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Papua New, Guinea, during June-August, 2004 and during January-August, 2006.

 

Fieldwork among food scientists (in the United States and England), palm-oil growers (in Papua New Guinea ), food processors (in Papua New Guinea and Fiji), food consumers (in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and the U.S.), corporate executives and museum curators (in Japan) concerning the international engagement with ramen noodles, from  June-July 2008 and June, 2010-August-2011.

 

Fieldwork among conservationists, hunters, farmers, and government officials located near Brookings, South Dakota, during June-August, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. In addition, I banded bluebills along the Mississippi River and consulted with environmentalists and biologists in Arkansas, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska.

 

BOOKS

Karavar:  Masks and Power in a Melanesian Ritual, Cornell University Press, 1974.  

 

Manners and Meaning in West Sumatra:  The Social Context of Consciousness, Yale University Press, 1984. 

 

Cultural Alternatives and a Feminist Anthropology:  An Analysis of Culturally Constructed Gender Interests in Papua New Guinea, Cambridge University Press, 1987.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)  Paperback edition, 1989. 

 

Twisted Histories, Altered Contexts:  Representing the Chambri in a World System, Cambridge University Press. (With Deborah Gewertz.)  This book won honorable mention for the Victor Turner Prize in ethnographic writing awarded by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology in 1991. Second edition, 1994. 

 

Articulating Change in the “Last Unknown,” Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press, 1995. (With Deborah Gewertz.)  This book was released as part of the series edited by John Comaroff, Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Bloch concerning Studies in the Ethnographic Imagination.   

 

Emerging Class in Papua New Guinea: The Telling of Difference, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999. (With Deborah Gewertz.)  

 

Yali’s Question: Sugar, Culture, and History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004. (With Deborah Gewertz.)  This book is a contribution to its Lewis Henry Morgan series.    

 

Cheap Meat, University of California Press, 2010. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

The Noodle Narratives, University of California Press, 2013. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

PUBLISHED PAPERS

“Indigenous Ideas of Order, Time and Transition in a New Guinea Cargo Movement,” American Ethnologist, (Vol. 1, 1974) pp. 255-267.

 

“The Chief of the Chambri:  On Social Change and Cultural Permeability,” American Ethnologist, (Vol. 12, 1985)  pp. 442-454. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“The Remarriage of Yebiwali: On Dominance and False Consciousness in a New Guinea Society,” In Dealing With Inequality, Marilyn Strathern, ed. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), 1987, pp. 63-88. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“A Confluence of Powers:  Entropy and Importation among the Chambri,” Oceania, (Vol. 57, 1986) pp. 99-113. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“The Rock Creek Auction:  Contradiction Between Competition and Community in Rural Montana,” Ethnology, (Vol. 26, 1987) pp. 297-311.  Reprinted in American Culture, Leonard Plotnicov, ed. (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press) 1990, pp. 223-240.

 

“On Unfinished Dialogues and Paper Pigs,” American Ethnologist, (Vol. 14, 1987) pp. 367-376. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“Reflexivity Deflected:  The Festival of Nations as an American Cultural Performance,” American Ethnologist, (Vol. 14, l987) pp. 654-667.

 

“Myths of Matriarchy Re-examined:  Indigenous Images of Alternative Gender Relationships,” in Myths of Matriarchy Reconsidered, Deborah Gewertz, ed. (Sydney, Oceania Monographs), 1988, pp. 195-211.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“Exemplars and the Reproduction of Everyday Life,” Dialectical Anthropology, (Vol. 13, 1988) pp. 31-43.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“Tourism and Anthropology in a Post-Modern World,” Oceania, (Vol. 61, 1989), pp. 37-54. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“The Rock Creek Rodeo:  Excess and Constraint in Men’s Lives,” American Ethnologist, (Vol. 17, 1990), pp. 628-645.

 

“We Think, Therefore They Are:  On Occidentalizing the World,” Anthropological Quarterly, (Vol. 64, 1991). pp. 80-91.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)  Reprinted in Cultures of Imperialism, Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1994.

 

“The Historical Course of True Love in the Sepik,” in Contemporary Pacific Society, Victoria Lockwood, et. al., eds.,  (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall), 1992, pp. 233-248.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“Responses from the Field,” Pacific Studies, (Vol. 16, 1994) pp. 111-116.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“First Contact with God:  Individualism, Agency and Revivalism in the Duke of York Islands,” Cultural Anthropology, (Vol. 8, 1993) pp. 279-305.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“From Darkness to Light in the George Brown Jubilee: The Invention of Non-tradition and the Inscription of a National History in East New Britain,” American Ethnologist, (Vol. 21, 1994). (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“The Triumph of Capitalism in East New Britain?  A Contemporary Papua New Guinea Rhetoric of Motives,”Oceania, (Vol. 64, 1993) pp. 1-17.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“The Discipline at Its Best,” Anthropology Newsletter, (Vol. 34, 1993) p. 1.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“Dueling Currencies in East New Britain:  The Construction of Shell Money as National Cultural Property,” inOccidentalism, James Carrier, ed., Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 161-191.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“The Individuation of Tradition in a Papua New Guinea Modernity,” American Anthropologist, (Vol. 98, 1996) pp. 114-126.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“On PepsiCo and Piety in a Papua New Guinea Modernity,” American Ethnologist, (Vol. 23, 1996) pp. 476-493. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“The Wewak Rotary Club:  The Middle Class in Papua New Guinea,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (Vol. 3, 1997) pp. 333-353. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“Why We Go Back to Papua New Guinea,” Anthropological Quarterly, (Vol. 70, 1997) pp. 127-136.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“Sleights of Hand in the Construction of Desire in a Papua New Guinean Modernity,” The Contemporary Pacific, (Vol. 10, 1998) pp. 345-368.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“On the Generification of Culture:  From Blow Fish to Melanesian” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (Vol. 7, 2001) pp. 509-525.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“The Telling of Class in Papua New Guinea,” Contemporary Pacific, (Spring, 2001), pp. 270-273.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“Margaret Mead and the Death of Alexis Gewertz Shepard,” Amherst Magazine, (Spring, 2002) pp. 10-15.  (With Deborah Gewertz).

 

“Toward an Ethnographically Grounded Study of Modernity,” in Globalization and Culture Change in the Pacific Islands, Victoria Lockwood, ed. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey:  Prentice Hall) 2003, pp. 273-284.

 

“Tourism and Anthropology in a Post-Modern World,” republished in Tourists and Tourism:  a Reader, Sharon Gmelch, ed. (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press), 2004, pp. 195-217.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“On Humiliation and Class in Contemporary Papua New Guinea,” in The Making of Global and Local Modernities in Melanesia, Joel Robbins and Holly Wardlow, eds., (Ashgate: Hampshire, England), 2005, pp. 163-170.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“Reconfiguring Amity at Ramu Sugar Limited,”  in Dilemmas and Exemplars:  The Anthropology of Morality in Melanesia and Beyond, John Barker, ed., (Ashgate: Hampshire, England), 2007, pp. 93-109.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“The Alimentary Forms of the Global Life,”  American Anthropologist, September, (Vol 109, 2007) pp. 496-508. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“Pacific-Island Gastrologies:  Following the Flaps,”  Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, September, 2008, in press. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“Women In the Cane:  Jealous Wives and Aggrieved Girl Friends” in Empirical Futures: Anthjropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz, Aisha Kahn, George Baca and Stephen Palmie, eds., (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press), 2009, pp. 173-195.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“Excusing the Haves and Blaming the Have-Nots in Jared Diamond’s Histories,” inQuestioning  Collapse, Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee, eds., (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), 2010, pp. 329-351. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

Expanding Definitions, Contracting Contexts:  A Comment on Mosko’s ‘Partible Penitents’,”Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Vol 16, 2010), pp. 250-252.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

“The Sustainability Wrangles,” City and Society, under review.

 

REVIEWS

Of Keebet von Benda-Beckman, The Broken Stairways to Consensus: Village Justice and State Courts in Minangkabau, in American Ethnologist, (Vol. 12, 1985) pp. 378-379.

 

Of Patrick Gesch, Initiative and Initiation, in American Anthropologist, (Vol. 88, 1986) pp. 994-995.

 

Of Roy Wagner, Asiwinarong, in American Ethnologist, (Vol. 15, 1988) pp. 798-799.

 

Of the film by Dennis O’Rourke, Cannibal Tours, in American Anthropologist, (Vol. 91, 1989) pp. 274-75.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

Of Fredrik Barth, Cosmologies, in the Making in Man, (Vol. 22, 1989), p. 766.

 

Of the film by Philip Singer, Water Witching and Dowsing in Middle America, in American Anthropologist, (Vol. 92, 1990), pp. 266-267.

 

Of the film by Robin Anderson and Bob Connolly, Joe Leahy’s Neighbors, in American Anthropologist, September, 1990. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

Of Don Handelman, Mirrors and Models, in Journal of Anthropological Research, (Vol. 47, 1991), pp. 121-124.

 

Of the film by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, Black Harvest, in American Anthropologist, (Vol. 94, 1992) pp. 1026-27. (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

Of Akos Ostor, Vessels of Time, in American Anthropologist, (Vol. 96, 1994) pp. 1002-1003.

 

Of Bernard Juillerat, ed., Shooting the Sun, in American Ethnologist, (Vol. 22, 1995) pp. 436-437.

 

Of Lamont Lindstrom, Cargo Cult, in American Ethnologist, (Vol. 22, 1995) pp. 1033-34.

 

Of Caroline Tauxe, Farms, Mines and Main Streets, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (Vol. 1, 1995) pp. 218-219.

 

Of Harvey Whitehead, Inside the Cult, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (Vol. 3, 1997) pp. 646-647.

 

Of James Clifford, Routes, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (Vol. 4, 1998) pp. 367-368.  (With Deborah Gewertz.)

 

Of Robert Lavenda, Corn Fests and Water Carnivals, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (Vol. 4, 1998) pp. 842-843.

Of John Bennett and Sena Kohl, Settling the Canadian-American West, 1890-1915, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (Vol. 4, 1998) pp. 158-159.

 

Of Andrew Midian, The Value of Indigenous Music in the Life and Ministry of the Church, inJournal of the Polynesian Society (Vol. 11, 2002) pp. 187-189.

 

Of Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive by Johannes Fabian in Anthropology and Humanism, forthcoming.

 

 

OTHER RECENT PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

Presenter of papers at many national and international conferences.

 

Program Co-Chair of the 1993 meetings of the American Anthropological Association

 

Keynote speaker at the 1995 meetings of the Northeastern Anthropological Association.

 

Project Director at Trinity College of the Ford Foundation initiative entitled “Crossing Borders,” designed to globalize the undergraduate curriculum, 1998-1999.

 

Committee-member of the Institutional Review Board, the Faculty Grievance Committee, Trinity College, 2000-2009.

 

Co-convener of the Melanesia Interest Group within the American Anthropological Association, 2000-2002.

 

Lewis Henry Morgan Lecturer, University of Rochester, 2002.

 

Invited speaker, Seminar in Social Theory, University of Kentucky, 2009.