Beth Buggenhagen is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University and holds a Faculty Curatorship at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures from 2012-2015.  She is a cultural anthropologist whose research analyzes the politics of social production and value, material culture, visuality, gender, Islam, and globalization. These interests have emerged from her fieldwork in Senegal and with Senegalese migrants in New York City and Chicago. Her fieldwork in Senegal from 1999-2000 resulted in the book, Muslim Families in Global Senegal (Indiana University Press 2011). She analyzes Muslim trade networks and the transmission of enduring social value though cloth and religious offerings. Highlighting women’s participation in these networks and the financial strategies they rely on, she considers the connections between economic profits and ritual and social authority. She argues that these strategies are not responses to a dispersed community in crisis, but rather produce new roles, wealth, and worth for Senegalese women in all parts of the globe. She is also a co-author of Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectivities (University of California Press 2010), co-edited with Anne-Maria B. Makhulu and Stephen Jackson. Her current book project focuses on the place of photography in the urban economy of Dakar, Senegal.

Please see Dr. Buggenhagen’s full biography on the Department of Anthropology website.