Donna Lynn Perry

I am a cultural anthropologist and a member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology since 2003. I am also a member of the Globalization Studies Advisory Committee. I have extensive fieldwork experience in Senegal, West Africa among Wolof-speaking farmers. In addition, I now live with my husband (anthropologist Jonathan Amith) for part of the year in an indigenous village in Mexico, where we speak Nahuatl (the Aztec language). All of my work concerns globalization, modernity, and social change as experienced and perceived by local peoples. My Ph.D. focused on the transformation of domestic and community power structures among Wolof farmers in the wake of neoliberal reform. One of my two current research topics concerns children's rights, specifically an examination of the social history and local views of talibes (the institution of child-disciplies who live with a Muslim sage for many years and endure various hardships, who are now targeted by human rights NGOs). My second research topic concerns cross-border trade, and involves analysis of farmer-state relations in a milieu marked by smuggling and corruption. I have also published articles on transnational migration and microcredit. I teach the following classes at Gettysburg College: ANTH 103 "Introduction to Cultural Anthropology"; ANTH 221 "Language & Culture"; ANTH 223 "Indigenous Peoples, the Environment, and the Global Economy"; ANTH 239 "African Modernities"; ANTH 300 "History of Anthropological Theory"; ANTH 302 "Human Rights through an Anthropological Lens"; and ANTH 323 "Field Methods in Cultural Anthropology."