{"id":501,"date":"2014-11-23T13:01:39","date_gmt":"2014-11-23T18:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carleton.ca\/socanth\/?post_type=cu_people&p=501"},"modified":"2025-07-11T10:40:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T14:40:09","slug":"rosenblatt-daniel","status":"publish","type":"cu_people","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/people\/rosenblatt-daniel\/","title":{"rendered":"Daniel Rosenblatt"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Areas of Interest<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Cultural Performance; Self-Construction, Identity, & Practice; Global-Local Interrelationships; Local Modernities; New Zealand and Polynesian Ethnography; North American Ethnography & American Studies; Postcolonialism & Colonial History; Social Theory; Media Studies & Visual Anthropology; Indigenous Peoples\u2019 Movements; Migration and Urbanization; Ritual; Visual Art; Countercultural Movements<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I am a cultural anthropologist interested in social thought, contemporary critical and anthropological theory, and the history and ethnography of both the Pacific and the contemporary U.S. My Pacific research (with New Zealand Maori) is concerned with the performance and experience of local cultural traditions and identities in the context created by such transnational forces as capitalism, colonialism, modernity, and globalization. I also explore performances, identities, and experience in my U.S. work, which is currently centered on the ways people negotiate their relationship to the idea of “success.” In both cases I am interested in the interplay between ritual\/symbolic constructions of the world and the possibilities for imagining political projects and attempting to achieve political agency. In NZ, this leads to a concern with the indigenization of such things as city life, development, and modernity as part of an effort to find a place for tradition in modern life and, in the U.S., I am interested in the logics and expressions of the pursuit (or refusal) of upward mobility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

My dissertation (Houses and Hopes: Urban Marae and the Indigenization of Modernity in New Zealand) is an ethnographic and historical account of the \u201cMaori Renaissance\u201d\u2014the revival of traditional culture by indigenous New Zealanders, who today live mainly in cities. In it, argue that the things Maori revive and the ends they hope to achieve are rooted in both the history of their relationship to New Zealand\u2019s colonial settlers and in the understandings, values, and institutions that Maori brought to that encounter\u2014rooted, in other words, in something akin to what anthropologists have traditionally called culture, albeit \u201cculture\u201d understood as a dynamic, historically changing ground for meaningful action. I focus on one institution, the marae, a complex of buildings centered on an elaborately carved meeting house that is thought of by Maori as an ancestor. Marae have long been central to rural, “traditional,” Maori life, but over the last thirty years there has been an explosion of marae construction, mainly in cities. Marae have come to play a key role in Maori attempts to regain their land, to preserve their language, and to win a place for their \u201cculture\u201d at the center of contemporary New Zealand life. Why are these houses the focus of struggle? I answer that question by showing how houses became institutionalized in the second half of the nineteenth century, emerging as both sites and emblems of Maori community life. Symbolically rich, the houses reflect and embody traditional conceptions of persons, groups, and the cosmos\u2014they are inventions that are nevertheless outgrowths of tradition. Their presence today in settings that would otherwise be understood as belonging solely to the world of the settler state and global modernity reframes those settings, helping to maintain a distinct Maori world. I am currently at work on a book based on this material, tentatively called Houses and Hopes: Cultural Invention As Cultural Continuity<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At present I am pursuing a number of projects: In the summer of 2005 I did preliminary fieldwork for a study of the recently established “Maori Television” network. This will allow me to explore further the ways in which Maori position themselves with respect to “popular culture,” both local and global. In the longer term I would like to examine the more explicitly political aspects of the “globalization of indigenousness,” both in terms of the concrete connections made between indigenous peoples in different places and in terms of the emergence of “indigenousness” as a perspective from which to criticize the contemporary world order (as among Mexican Zapatistas). While my previous published work on the U.S. has been about countercultural “resistance” involving body modification, my next project will address mainstream “middle class” life, specifically weddings, which I see as sites where Americans perform both their aspirations and their identities, and as places where the interrelation between cultural structures, specific historical moments, mass marketing, and public culture can be observed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Linking the different strands of my work is a commitment to exploring the implications of the anthropological idea that our form of life\u2014industrial capitalism, modernity, the West, \u201cthe new world order,\u201d however you wish to name it\u2014is a cultural order as much as it is a political and economic order. Hence my interest in whether Maori can find a way to live in our world without becoming us, and conversely, in just how it is that we become us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Courses Taught At Carleton<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n