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|  |
Niko Besnier | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | July 6, 1958 Algiers, Algeria |
| Citizenship | United States New Zealand France |
| Occupation(s) | Cultural Anthropology Linguistic Anthropology |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of California, Santa Barbara Stanford University University of Southern California |
| Doctoral advisor | Elinor Ochs |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | La Trobe University |
Niko Besnier is a socio-cultural and linguistic anthropologist. His early fieldwork focused on Pacific Island societies, particularly Tonga and Tuvalu. He is recognized for his scholarship in the anthropology of sport, the body, gender and sexuality, and language, culture, and politics. His research has also focused on a variety of other topics, including migrations, politics in small-scale societies, economic relations, emotions, social class, and globalization.
Besnier divides his time between California and the Aegean region of Turkey. He is fluent in English, French, Spanish, Tongan, and Tuvaluan, and speaks seven other languages at various levels of competence.
Education
editNiko Besnier was born in Algeria and was raised primarily in Spain. He obtained a BA in mathematics from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1978, an MA in linguistics from Stanford University in 1981, and a PhD in linguistics in 1986 from the University of Southern California, where he was Elinor Ochs’ first graduate student.
Career
editNiko Besnier has taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1986-88), Yale University (1989-95), Victoria University of Wellington (1996-2002), UCLA (2002-05), and the University of Amsterdam (2005-22). He has held visiting appointments at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, University of Auckland, Kagoshima University, Waseda University (twice), University of Melbourne, École normal supérieure Paris, Université de Toulouse III Paul Sabatier, University of Manchester, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University,[1] the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Universidad de la República in Montevideo, and Charles University in Prague. In 2017-19, he was Research Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, where he is Adjunct Professor of Anthropology.
In 2015-19, Niko Besnier was editor-in-chief of the journal American Ethnologist.[2] During his editorship, the journal experienced a significant increase in both impact factor and ranking. [3]
Scholarship
editNiko Besnier’s early research was based on long-term fieldwork on Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu, and concerned language in its social context. For example, his book, Literacy, Emotion, and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll,[4] analyzed the grassroot literacy practices of the inhabitants of the atoll and was in dialogue with the rethinking of literacy as a social practice, rather than as a deterministic force, that was taking place in the 1980s and 1990s. Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics[5] analyzes gossiping on Nukulaelae as a mechanism that is both politically levelling and attention seeking, enabling people to control each other’s reputations, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Both books demonstrate that, while Nukulaelae is a relatively isolated atoll, it is embedded in global forces that shape people’s communicative activities and lives. In 2000, he also published a detailed analytic grammar of the Tuvaluan language based on an extensive corpus of naturalistic texts he had gathered over 20 years of field research.[6]
Since 1994, he has been conducting long-term fieldwork with transgender people in the Pacific Islands, focusing in particular on Tonga, where they are locally referred to as leitī.[7] He has analyzed the complex position that this small minority occupies in the society, in which they are at once admired and marginalized. On the occasion of the beauty pageants they organize, such as the annual Miss Galaxy pageant, the entire society comes to admire their inventiveness and creativity.[8] At the same time, they are marginalized by the structuring of society in terms of marriage and descent.[9] However, their social position is rapidly changing as Tonga interacts with global forces, primarily through their diasporic communities in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States.[10]
In 2012-17, Niko Besnier directed a project titled “Globalization, Sports, and the Precarity of Masculinity,” funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council.[11] The project focused on how the neoliberal transformation of the sports industries in the Global North have encouraged young men in many countries of the Global South to seek a career in world sport as a solution to poverty and the concomitant crisis of masculinity, despite the fact that very few managed to turn their dreams into reality. The project brought together questions of gender, global inequalities, and the body by analyzing how large-scale structures affect ordinary people’s everyday experiences.[12]
In 2020, he initiated a new research project in wellness and its different manifestations around the world.[13] In many societies, the uncertainties that the turn to neoliberalism has created and that the Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated have led ordinary people to pursue new projects of remaining healthy. While these projects are commonly understood as personal, they are in fact deeply enmeshed in politics, whether overtly or covertly. They pose questions about the ownership of “traditional” wellness practices, the appropriation of these practices by the corporate world, and what has become of the body in uncertain times.
Selected Publications
editBooks
Balzani, Marzia, and Niko Besnier. 2022. Social and Cultural Anthropology for the 21st Century: Connected Worlds. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Besnier, Niko, Domenica Gisela Calabrò, and Daniel Guinness, eds. 2021. Sport, Migration, and Gender in the Neoliberal Age. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Besnier, Niko, Susan Brownell, and Thomas F. Carter. 2018. The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics. Oakland: University of California Press. Translated into Spanish, French, and Japanese.
Besnier, Niko, and Kalissa Alexeyeff, eds. 2014. Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Besnier, Niko. 2011. On the Edge of the Global: Modern Anxieties in a Pacific Island Nation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Besnier, Niko. 2009. Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Besnier, Niko. 2000. Tuvaluan: A Polynesian Language of the Central Pacific. London: Routledge.
Besnier, Niko. 1995. Literacy, Emotion, and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
External Links
editBesnier's staff page at La Trobe University.
Niko Besnier, "The Sport Industries in the Neoliberal Age and the Reconfiguration of the Future in the Global South," Ladislav Holy Lecture 2022, Czech Association for Social Anthropology, February 19, 2022.
Niko Besnier, “Intégration, diversité, appartenance: catégories épineuses,” conférence inaugurale, Journée d’étude “Que fait le sport pour l'intégration ?” September 20, 2019.
Niko Besnier and Ghassan Hage in conversation, "Conversations in Anthropology@Deakin," 14th Episode. Podcast, July 2018.
References
edit- ^ "Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Niko Besnier". Retrieved 23 May 2024.
- ^ Besnier, Niko (2016). "From the Editor". American Ethnologist. 43 (1): 7-11. doi:10.1111/amet.12258. Retrieved 23 May 2024.
- ^ Besnier, Niko (13 October 2019). "From the editor: What I Have Learned in the Last Four Years". American Ethnologist. 46 (4): 381-86. doi:10.1111/amet.12834. Retrieved 23 May 2024.
- ^ Besnier, Niko (1995). Literacy, Emotion, and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511519864. ISBN 978-0-521-48087-1. Retrieved 23 May 2024.
- ^ "Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics". 24 June 2020.
- ^ "Tuvaluan: A Polynesian Language of the Central Pacific".
- ^ “Polynesian Gender Liminality Through Time and Space.” In Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, edited by Gilbert Herdt, 285–328. New York: Zone. 1994; “Sluts and Superwomen: The Politics of Gender Liminality in Urban Tonga.” Ethnos 62, no. 1: 5–31. 1997.
- ^ “Transgenderism, Locality, and the Miss Galaxy Beauty Pageant in Tonga.” American Ethnologist 29, no. 3: 534–566. 2002.
- ^ “The Social Production of Abjection: Desire and Silencing Among Transgender Tongans.” Social Anthropology 12, no. 3: 301–323. 2004.
- ^ "Les politiques identitaires entre le local et le global : La mobilisation transgenre aux îles Tonga (Pacifique sud)." Ethnologie Française 53, no. 1: 117–133. 2024.
- ^ CORDIS EU research results, "Globalization, Sports, and the Precarity of Masculinity". Retrieved 23 May 2024.
- ^ "GLOBALSPORT Project".
- ^ "Narratives of Health and Wellbeing in the Construction of Place: Palm Springs in the American Imaginary," in Narratives of Wellbeing, edited by Tarry Phillips et al. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.