Anthropology and the Environment

Lisa Cliggett

Associate Professor of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
University of Kentucky
211 Lafferty Hall
Lexington, KY 40506-0024

Email: lisa.cliggett[at]uky.edu

Lisa Cliggett has carried out ethnographic research in Zambia on household economy, family dynamics, environmental change and migration since the early 1990s.  Her research since 2001 takes her to the border zones of the Kafue National Park, Zambia’s largest national park.  Since 2004 the National Science Foundation has funded a variety of Cliggett’s projects in the migrant destination next to the park. One project, a collaboration with Jon Unruh (Geography, McGill University) and Roderick Hay (Geography, Cal State U. Domiguez Hills) examines migration, land tenure insecurity and environmental change. The other project, a collaboration with Deborah Crooks (Anthropology, University of Kentucky) looks at food and livelihood security in the migrant context.  Also during the 2004-2007 time frame Cliggett and Crooks ran an NSF funded field school in ethnographic research methods for anthropology graduate students.

She has published a number of articles in various anthropology venues, including American Anthropologist, Human Organization and Human Ecology. Her books include Grains from Grass: aging, gender and famine in rural Africa 2005, Cornell University Press; Economies and Cultures: foundations of Economic Anthropology (Co-authored with Richard Wilk) 2007, Westview Press; and Economies and the Transformation of Landscape (co-edited with Christopher Pool) 2008, Alta Mira Press.