Susan Carol Rogers

An American ethnographer of France: Reflexions on a long adventure, IN Chevalier, Combessier, Monjaret (eds): Carrieres d’Ethnographe. Collection CTHS-SEF (forthcoming; in French).

Transatlantic Parallaxess:Toward reciprocal anthropology, Berghahn Books, 2015 (co-edited with A. Raulin; French-language version published by Éditions CNRS, 2012)

"Faux-amis in the countryside: deciphering the familiar", IN Parallaxes Transatlantiqiues, 2015.

"Which heritage? Nature, culture and identity in French rural tourism", French Historical Studies 25, 2002

"Anthropology in France", Annual Review of Anthropology 30, 2001. (French translation published in Terrain 39, 2002.)

Farming visions: Agriculture in French culture, French Politics, Culture, and Society 18, 2000

Natural histories: The rise and fall of French rural studies, French Historical Studies 19, 1995

Shaping Modern Times in Rural France: The transformation and reproduction of an Aveyronnais community. Princeton University Press, 1991.

Good to think: The 'peasant' in contemporary France, Anthropological Quarterly 60, 1987

Mixing paradigms on mixed farming: anthropological and economic views of specialization in Illinois agriculture, IN Chibnik (ed): Farm Work and Fieldwork: Anthropological Perspectives on American Agriculture. Cornell University Press, 1987

Paysans, Femmes et Citoyens: Luttes pour le pouvoir dans un village Lorrain, Actes Sud, 1980 (with Claude Karnoouh and Hugues Lamarche)

Masculine space, feminine space: essay on difference, Etudes Rurales 74, 1979 (in French)

Women's place: a critical review of anthropology theory, Comparative Studies in Society and History 20, 1978

Female forms of power and the myth of male dominance: a model of female/male interaction in peasant society, American Ethnologist 2, 1975

Updated August 2016

A highlight of this past year was the English-language publication of Transatlantic Parallaxes: Toward Reciprocal Anthropology by Berghahn Books. ( http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=RaulinTransatlantic).  This collected volume, co-edited with Anne Raulin (Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense) is the fruit of a long and exciting collaborative project.  She and I have been comparing notes for a long time on the particular challenges and pleasures we had experienced as foreign ethnographers of familiar places (France in my case, US in Anne’s). Some years ago, it seemed time to explore some of these issues more systematically, so we brought a handful of American anthropologists specializing in France together with several French anthropologists having fieldwork experience in the US.  Within this group, we all stand in reciprocal relationships with each other as both native subjects and foreign experts, conduct research in settings that are readily accessible and familiar to our audiences, and hold nationalities carrying roughly equivalent amounts of geo-political power and academic legitimacy.   In all of those ways, our ethnographic positions are quite odd with respect to classic anthropological practice, but likely to become increasingly common in the 21st century. 

Our group met several times over a number of years to discuss our fieldwork experience in and ethnographic analyses about each other’s societies. These encounters yielded a wealth of novel and empirically well-grounded insights about the production of anthropological knowledge, including some that were illuminated by the various contretemps and impasses we experienced within the group: I think we were all alternately dazzled by the insights forthcoming from a foreign ethnographer’s vision of our own society, and dismayed by our sense of slight, trite or distorted impressions sometimes emerging from that lens. Transatlantic Parallaxes comprises ten essays, each based on original ethnographic research and shaped by those discussions. As a set, they provide intriguing glimpses of both American and French societies, as well as a taste of the enticing potentials—and pitfalls-- for a 21st century reciprocal anthropology that might be built on such dialogues among anthropologists and anthropologies from/about any combination of other places. A French version of the volume was published by CNRS Editions in 2012 ( http://www.cnrseditions.fr/ethnologieanthropologie/6613-parallaxes-transatlantiques-sous-la-direction-danne-raulin-et-susan-carol-rogers.html).

This project, I think, is a fitting culmination to my career, which has been largely driven by two deep commitments: to exploring the ways that classic premises, questions and methods shaping our discipline may be productively adapted and applied to new contexts or issues; and to taking seriously the challenges—but especially the tremendous intellectual and ethical value—of wholehearted engagement with colleagues based in our “foreign” research settings and with the anthropology they produce.