Hugh Raffles
Professor of Anthropology and Director, Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought
Email
rafflesh@newschool.edu
Office Location
D - Albert & Vera List Academic Center - 6 East 16th Street
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Profile
Hugh Raffles is Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and Director of the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography and Social Thought (GIDEST). His work is a sustained ethnographic exploration of relations between humans, animals, and things. Hugh is completing his new book, an anthropology of elemental things that draws on fieldwork primarily in northern places--Iceland, Svalbard, Greenland, and the Hebrides--to raise questions about the practice of substance, place, and temporality through close accounts of objects that range in scale from landscapes to monuments to pebbles.
Hugh’s essays have appeared in a wide variety of venues, including Granta, Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, the New York Times, Cabinet, and Orion. He is the author, most recently, of Insectopedia (Pantheon, 2010), a New York Times Notable Book, and was a recipient of a 2010 Whiting Writers’ Award.
Ethnography; nature; writing and other forms of representation and expression.
Degrees Held
DFES 1999, Yale University
Recent Publications
Books
Insectopedia (2010)
A New York Times Notable Book.
In Amazonia, A Natural History (2002)
A Choice/American Library Association Outstanding Academic Title.
Articles and Book Chapters
“Solve et Coagula,” forthcoming in Frances Richard, ed., I Stand in My Place With My Own Day Here: Site-Specific Art at The New School (New York, 2019)
“Vize (Vision),” forthcoming in A2 kulturní čtrnáctideník (Prague), 2019.
“Prefácio,” in Emilie Stoll, Edna Alencar, Ricardo Folhes, and Chantal Medaets, eds., Paisagens evanescentes: Estudos sobre a percepção das transformações nas paisagems pelos moradores dos rios Amazônicos (Paris & Bélem, 2018)
“Living Through the End Times,” (co-authored with The GIDEST Collective) New Geographies vol. 9 (Fall 2017): 48-52.
“Against Purity,” Social Research: An International Quarterly vol. 84, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 171-182.
“London Stone Redux,” in John Law and Evelyn Ruppert, eds., Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque. London: Mattering Press, 2016, 224-241.
“Up, Up, and Away,” contribution to Tomás Saraceno’s Arachnid Orchestra, November 2015.
“Suspended,” Orion vol. 34, no. 2 (March/April 2015): 12.
“Beetle Wrestler (Natalie Jeremijenko and Chris Woebken),” Design and Violence, Museum of Modern Art, September 2014. Reprinted in Paola Antonelli and Jamer Hunt, eds., Design and Violence. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015, 198-201.
"Foundations,” Cabinet (2014)
"Twenty-five Years is a Long Time," Cultural Anthropology (2012)
"A Conjoined Fate," Orion (2010)
"Jews, Lice, and History," Public Culture (2007)
"Cricket Fighting," Granta (2007)
"The Language of the Bees: An Interview with Hugh Raffles by Sina Najafi," Cabinet (2007)
"Fluvial Intimacies," in Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource, ed. Amita Baviskar (2005)
"Towards a Critical Natural History," Antipode (2005)
"Jungle," in Patterned Ground: Ecologies of Nature and Culture, ed. Stephan Harrison, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift (2004)
"Further Reflections on Amazonian Environmental History: Transformations of Rivers and Streams," (with Antoinette WinklerPrins) Latin American Research Review (2003)
"Intimate Knowledge," International Social Science Journal (2002)
"The Uses of Butterflies," American Ethnologist (2001)
"Landscape Change in Tidal Floodplains Near the Mouth of the Amazon River," (with D.J. Zarin, V.F.G. Pereira, M. Pinedo-Vásquez, F.G. Rabelo, and R.G. Congalton)
Forest Ecology and Management (2001)
"Social Memory and the Politics of Place-making in Northeastern Amazonia," UC Berkeley Working Papers in Environmental Politics (2000)
"The Amazon: A Natural Landscape?" Seminar (2000)
"Local Theory: Nature and the Making of an Amazonian Place," Cultural Anthropology (1999)
[Co-Winner, 2003 Junior Scholar Award of the Anthropology & Environment Section, American Anthropological Association]
"Exploring the Anthropogenic Amazon: Estuarine Landscape Transformations in Amapá, Brazil," in Várzea: Diversity, Development and Conservation of Amazonia's Whitewater Floodplain, Christine Padoch, J. Márcio Ayres, Miguel Pinedo-Vásquez, and Anthony Henderson, eds. (1999)
"Engineers of Amazonia," Natural History (1997)
Research Interests
Human/non-human/non-animal relations
Awards And Honors
2018 Openbook Award (Taiwan)
2012 Ludwik Fleck Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science
2012 Shortlist, de Groene Waterman Prize (Belgium)
2011 Orion Book Award
2010 Special Prize for Extending Ethnographic Understanding from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology
2009 Whiting Writers' Award
2004 Honorable Mention, Sharon Stephens First Book Prize of the American Ethnological Society
2003 Co-Winner, Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology
Current Courses
Ethnography and Writing
Ind Senior Project
Ind Senior Project (Spring 2019)
Independent Study
Independent Study (Spring 2019)
PhD Proseminar II