Department of Anthropology
Academic Staff - Greg Downey
When I first fell in love with anthropology at the University of Virginia, I did so out of an odd nexus: I took a class on social deviance with Richard Handler, worked as a door-to-door salesman one summer in the Four Corners region of New Mexico, and became fascinated by the intersection of economics and culture, something I could not learn about in my economics units. When I tried to explain to one of my economics professors why I was switching my concentration to anthropology, he said: 'You want to study "taste".' He was right; it was the only way that economists could talk about the wide variation in values and priorities found in different cultures. Anthropology was the one discipline that seemed to me to take seriously the profound variety in the way people lived that I was coming to discover, whether in the classroom or going door-to-door with a case of books to sell.Although my route to the subject was circuitous and too long to describe, for more than a decade I have been conducting research on the perceptual, phenomenological, and physiological effects of long-term physical training, especially sports and dance. I first turned to these topics to better understand the socialization of boys for manhood and the variety in masculinity across cultures, especially their intangible, unspoken, and corporeal dimensions. While doing my masters and doctoral degrees in anthropology at the University of Chicago, my research in sports, dance, and ethnomusicology, and my apprenticeship in the Afro-Brazilian martial art, capoeira, led to several years of field research in Brazil. I've returned repeatedly both for this project and to investigate the on-going battle between large landholders and the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (the Movimento do Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST).
After completing my PhD in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1998 and working briefly as a design consultant in Chicago, I first joined Columbia University's Society of Fellows in the Humanities, where I taught in that university's core curriculum, reading texts from Plato and the Qu'ran to Hayek and Foucault. In 2000, I accepted a position at the University of Notre Dame, where I taught until the end of 2005, convening units on research methods, anthropological theory, Latin America, applied anthropology, and music of the African Diaspora.
Although I arrived at Macquarie in 2006, my first year here has been spent on leave from teaching with support of a writing grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc. I look forward to returning to my teaching duties and will be convening the department's units on human rights and culture, ethnographic research methods, and economic anthropology. I also hope to institute a new unit for undergraduates on human evolution and diversity that will allow students to learn from new discoveries about human origins, genetic variation, ethnicity, sex, child development, primitive technology, and our species' early social organization.
In my teaching, I strive very hard to help students to develop anthropological skills in research, analysis and writing so that they might be applied in a wide range of settings. Through my research and other activities, I have been persistently involved in human rights work, principally in Brazil, but also through my involvement with Amnesty International. This area of specialty includes a special focus both on research ethics and on applied anthropology in advocacy work. I serve as the anthropology department's representative on the university ethics committee that reviews proposal for human research and am available for consultation by graduate and honours students interested in research design and ethics compliance.
Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio.