James B. Greenberg

James B. Greenberg came to University of Arizona in 1982, and is a Senior Research Anthropologist in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) and Professor of Anthropology in the School of Anthropology. He received his education at the University of Michigan, BA in English 1969, MA in Anthropology in 1971, and Ph. D. in Anthropology in 1978. His areas of expertise lie in economic anthropology, political ecology, law, and development, anthropology of violence, urban anthropology, migration, Mexico and the borderlands. His dissertation, titled “Santiago’s Sword: adaptations to exploitation among the Chatino of Oaxaca," examined competing theories of the economic functions of expenditures religious fiestas systems in peasant communities. In 1994, with his colleague, Thomas K. Park he began the Journal of Political Ecology and they have co-edited ever since, being joined later by Simon Batterbury and Casey Walsh. That same year, he created the Political Ecology Society, which holds its annual meetings with the Society for Applied Anthropology.

Prior to coming to the University of Arizona, Dr. Greenberg taught at the University of Denver, Mankato State University, Arizona State University, and Indiana University. Between 1982 and 1992, he headed BARA’s borderland section, and carried out studies that on the economics of working class Mexican households in Tucson, Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora, as well as research that focused on educational issues in Tucson minority communities. He has received grants from the Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation among others. As a Fulbright fellow in Mexico in 1990-91, he began work on credit among the Mixe of Oaxaca—work that resulted in continuing research and publications on the anthropology of credit and finance. In the early 1990s, he was part of a team that assessed the impacts of the new biosphere reserve on the fishing communities of the upper Gulf of California, work that also took him to work briefly in fishing communities in the Dominican Republic. More recently, he was part of a team that assessed Oxfam’s program of micro-finance for women in Mali, then did a political ecology study of the threatened snail (plicopurpura columellaris) that produces a purple dye used since pre-Hispanic times to extract a purple dye; and was part of a bi-national team that did an assessment of tuberculosis in Mexican indigenous communities in Arizona, Sonora, and Oaxaca.

His current research broadly examines the impact of global capital on the development and well-being of both human populations and the ecosystems that sustain them. Specifically, his research looks both at the effects of larger processes on the historical development of capital, and at local variants of capital that development has spawned. In pursuing these interests, he had focused on credit: how it is culturally embedded and used as economic instrument, social relationship, and technology of power. At the level of local processes, his research examines the incorporation of local populations and local ecologies into wider systems, and how their inclusion changes the dynamics of the systems.

In 1974, while doing his fieldwork he met his wife, Eva Zavaleta Rios, a native of Juquila, Oaxaca. They have two children, and three grandchildren. Dr. Greenberg is also a classical and flamenco guitarist, and with his wife has run a guitar business, zavaletas-guitarras.com, that specializes in guitars made in Spain since 1997.