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Katherine E. Hoffman
Associate Professor (PhD Columbia 2000) RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS Language / Expressive Culture, Ethnicity / Indigenism, Language Ideologies, Language Shift and Endangerment, Gender, Migration, Rural-Urban Relations, French Colonialism, Imazighen (Berbers), Morocco / North Africa, France
Katherine E. Hoffman is a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist who specializes in the relationship between expressive culture, ethnicity, and political economy. Her research explores this nexus in North Africa, and particularly Morocco, from the late 19th c. to the present, particularly as it has been shaped by the processes of French colonialism, anti-imperialism, nationalism, and postnationalism. Her book We Share Walls: Language, Land and Gender in Berber Morocco book (2008, Wiley-Blackwell) is an ethnographic account of the ways in which political economy and migration have shaped rural ethnolinguistic repertoires in both talk and song, and in Arabic and Tashelhit Berber languages, among the Ishelhin Berbers of southwestern Morocco.
A second book currently being drafted, Mirror of the Soul: Language, Islam, and Law in French Native Policy of Morocco (1912-1956), considers the language ideologies underpinning French colonial administration of rural Morocco. It argues that notions about the inherent interrelationship between language, law, religion and morality had consequences for the development of French Native Policy (politique indigène), Moroccan nationalism, and more recently, contemporary struggles around Amazigh (Berber) linguistic and cultural rights. Of particular interest in this project are the Berber customary courts (tribunaux coutumiers) that not only elicited nationalist polemic but also generated massive amounts of labor from Protectorate officials and their North African employees.
With historian Susan Gilson Miller of Harvard University, Hoffman is co-editor of the interdisciplinary volume Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib (Indiana University Press, 2010). Hoffman's most recent research, based in southern Tunisia and Western Libya, examines the role of ethnicity in the integration of populations displaced by political violence into the country of first asylum, as well as the ways in which transnational ethnic identity may facilitate refugee assimilation in the Global South. Simultaneously, the project considers the effects of the Arab Spring revolutions on minority populations, taking as a case study the Amazigh (Berber) populations of Libya and Tunisia. The project focuses on the women and the elderly who are central, albeit overlooked, actors in the construction and maintenance of local and transnational ethnic identities. The informal settlement of Libyan refugees from the Nafusa mountains and Nalut into Tunisia – in rural community-volunteered housing and private Tunisian homes – means that laypeople rather than aid workers are managing much of the integration of this displaced population. Refugees from western Libya and their southern Tunisian hosts are Imazighen (Berbers), speaking the Tamazight language and sharing both customs and longstanding discrimination by their respective states.
Hoffman has been awarded the American Council of Learned Societies’ Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, and has received fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, two divisions of the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-IIE, and the American Institute for Maghrib Studies. In Spring 2007, Hoffman was a resident fellow at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. She will be a fellow at Northwestern's Kaplan Institute for the Humanities during the 2011-2012 academic year, and a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Paris during the 2012-2013 academic year. She has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and American Anthropologist. Hoffman conducts field research in Tashelhit Berber, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and French.
In addition to her scholarly work, since the early 1990s, Hoffman has worked extensively on visual and print media projects, and responsible tourism, to increase understanding of Muslim populations. She has consulted for National Geographic Magazine and served as the expert on National Geographic Expedition's Moroccan Odyssey. She has also researched for numerous documentary film projects in Morocco and in Washington, DC. She authored the Introduction and several chapters of the Fodor’s Morocco first travel guide edition (New York: Random House, 2000). Applying her ethnographic concerns with gender and minority language to governmental policy, Hoffman consulted on a project to raise rural Moroccan girls’ completion of primary school, an initiative co-funded by AMIDEAST and the Moroccan Ministry of Education, in which she advocated for greater attention to native language in the classroom as well as basic sanitary facilities, both crucial to parental choices to remove girls from primary school. Whether in policy evaluation, popular media, or scholarly work, Hoffman is committed to demonstrating the continued relevance—even centrality—of rural life to local, national, and global shifts.
RECENT COURSES TAUGHT 498 Anthropology of Space and Place (w/ Dr. Cynthia Robin Rivera) 490 Language and Law 401-4 Logic of Inquiry: Linguistic Anthropology 389 Ethnographic Methods and Analysis 378 Law, Culture and Language 361 Talk as Social Action 330 Performance and Power in N. Africa and the Middle East 215 Culture through Language 101-6 Endangered Languages and Indigenous People
OTHER SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
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