Anthropology

Anthropology
Professor
212 Waldo Hall
Phone: 541-737-3857
Email: Nancy Rosenberger

I will be gone for much of the 2011-12 academic year on sabbatical. In the fall, I will return to Central Asia on an IREX grant. There I will spend two months in Tajikistan doing a study of women involved in small-scale food processing businesses—like making bread or yoghurt for sale. They will be located in various parts of Tajikistan—Khujand, Dushambe, Khatlon, and Khorog. Thanks to my friend Dr. Abdurahim Juraev at the Tajik State University of Law, Business, and Politics for his help on all of this! We look forward to an ongoing partnership between his university and Oregon State University.

In the winter and spring of 2012, I will return to Japan. In a study funded by the Northeast Asia Council, I will be interviewing organic farmers. My aim is to investigate how young farmers and women farmers (who tend to be young) approach organic farming. In their growing and selling, how do they negotiate the changes that are occurring in Japan where there is preference for local (Japanese) food and safe food, but not necessarily for purely organic food? I have found it interesting to explore organic farming in Japan as a social movement in which farmers on the ground have to act more flexibly than the movement leaders who maintain quite strict principles of direct consumer-producer relationships, self-sufficiency, and complete land, plant, and animal cycles on the farm. I am also bringing my interest in gender back into the organic farming movement to investigate how these intersect.. I am curious as to how the tsunami and radioactivity will affect these farmers, some of whom live within a hundred mile radius of the Fukushima nuclear plant. I know the effect has been profound, and that perceptions of what food is pure may greatly influence consumers’ perceptions. In fact, now they may be more interested in foreign food than they were in 2007 when consumers were shunning foreign food for Japanese-made food!

I will also continue my oral histories with women in Japan as part of a longitudinal study of women who were delaying marriage in 1993 when I first met them. This will be the fourth time I have talked with these women, so it will be fun to continue our oral histories. While in Japan I will be in touch with old friends. Many of them live in Morioka which is just an hour in from the tsunami zone in Iwate Prefecture. Evidently, they became refugees as well for awhile because after the earthquake and tsunami, they had no electricity and gasoline for several weeks. Food became very hard to find. My friend there who as a little girl ran from the flames in the World War II bombing of Tokyo, feels that her personal life has coincided with a second big crisis in Japan’s history.

Interspersed with this new research I will be finishing touches on a book on Japanese women. Further, our anthropology major has gone on-line, so I will be improving the e-campus and on-campus versions of the basic Anthropology course, 110. I will be incorporating my book on food security and food sovereignty in Uzbekistan, Seeking Food Rights, because it makes students think about food in relation to powerful governments and markets as well as differences by class, gender, ethnicity, and religion.

I continue to enjoy working with students as our majors, Masters, and PhD students increase in number. Increasing awareness of the injustices in the world and helping them to understand where they want to go with their research is always an interesting mentoring experience. My students work in a number of different areas including the local and regional food systems, food issues in Japan and Korea, neighborhood development in Portland, women in small-scale businesses in China, gender justice in promotion in the university, and the experience of youth in a frontier rural town in Oregon. The latter project takes off from the ethnographic field school that Joan Gross and I run every other year in September in rural Oregon. Just recently, we published a collection of excellent student papers on rural issues in Lakeview, to give back to the community and to expand ideas about rural life.

I continue to look for students in a number of fields: food and agricultural systems, gender, rural issues, small-scale and/or cross-cultural business and marketing concerns, and local/global interrelationships that are embedded in questions of power and resistance. Geographically, I am particularly interested in working with students doing projects in US, Japan, Korea, and Central Asia.