Jack Glazier
Chair/Professor of Anthropology

Specialties: Cultural anthropology, East Africa, American Jewish communities, African American communities, culture theory, ethnicity, ethnohistory, and American immigration history

Cingano Ndumo and Rabuta Njama look over Jack Glazier's field notes in Mbeere, Kenya, as they discussed the famed "nduiko," or generational handover ceremony

At Berkeley, Jack Glazier developed his interest in East Africa, particularly in regard to ritual, land tenure, and social change. He spent a total of eighteen months living with the Mbeere, a people of the Mt. Kenya periphery. He published a book, Land and the Uses of Tradition among the Mbeere of Kenya,
on the impact of freehold tenure on social organization and law. His articles on Mbeere custom, including funerary practice and belief, social structure, age organizations, and folklore have appeared in Man, Africa, the Journal of African Law, the Journal of American Folklore, and in various essay collections.

More recent research and publications have focused on immigration and ethnicity in the United States. His book, Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants Across America, was published in 1998 by Cornell University Press. His study focuses on the organized, secondary migration of Jewish immigrants from New York to other American towns and cities between 1901 and 1922 under the auspices of the Industrial Removal Office. The IRO promoted assimilation in an effort to combat anti-immigrant sentiment based on the alleged failure of newcomers to adapt themselves to American society. With a foreword by historian Gerald Sorin, Michigan State University Press published a paperback edition of the book in 2005.

Jack has also collaborated with the anthropologist Arthur L. Helweg on the inaugural volume, Ethnicity in Michigan, of the series, Discovering the Peoples of Michigan published by Michigan State University Press.

Research in progress centers on African American life in Christian County Kentucky, where Jack has spent the last three summers and a sabbatical semester in fall 2005 in ethnohistorical investigation. He is particularly interested in black institutional
life before and after the school desegration decision and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s and the ways in which African
Americans construe those momentous events and their consequences. In connection with this research, Jack has recently
written about Booker T. Washington's 1909 visit to western Kentucky and about African American communities and the concept of diaspora. He recently published an article on
diasporic consciousness among African Americans in the Encyclopedia of Diasporas and served on the advisory board of that reference work. He is currently writing a book on
race and history in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

Jack has held a number of professional offices in the Central States Anthropological Society, including the presidency in 1992. He has also served
on the Board of Directors and the Program Committee of the American Anthropological Association. He is a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association and the Royal
Anthropological Institute.

Courses taught at Oberlin include Introduction to Cultural Anthropology; Culture Theory; Anthropology of Sub-Saharan Africa; Culture, Symbol and Meaning; Immigrant America: Then and Now,
Immigration and Ethnicity in the United States; and Anthropology and Multiculturalism. He will teach a new course, Anthropology and Ethics, during the Spring semester of 2007.

B.A., Butler University, 1965
M.A., University of California (Berkeley), 1968
Ph.D., University of California (Berkeley), 1972

email: jack.glazier@oberlin.edu