Bilinda Straight

Associate Professor of Anthropology
Ph.D. 1997 University of Michigan

Contact
Moore 1001
(269) 387-0409
Email Website

Research interests: Human condition, experience. death. landscape, memory, indigenous histories, sexuality, violence, gender, adornment, material culture

Regional focus: East Africa and U.S.

Selected publications: Straight, B (2006) Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Straight, B, ed. (2005) Women on the Verge of Home. State University of New York Press.

Straight, B (2005) In the Belly of History: Memory, Forgetting, and the Hazards of Reproduction Among Samburu in Northern Kenya. Africa 75(1): 83-104.

Straight, B (2002) From Samburu heirlooms to New Age artifact: The cross cultural consumption of Mporo marriage beads. American Anthropologist 104: 7-21.

A closer look: Bilinda Straight is a cultural anthropologist who works with Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya on issues relating to consciousness, historical consciousness, gender, narrative, and material culture. Her first book, Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya, critically engages the phenomenological approach within anthropology and anthropology's "sensuous turn" through Samburu miracles and extraordinary experiences. Her second book (in progress), Histories of Sensuous Encounter in Northern Kenya (working title) examines visual and textual representations and experiential understandings of Samburu adornment and sexuality from 1884 to the present.