Catherine Lutz

I have researched and taught in a number of areas, including militarization and its shaping of social life beyond the battlefield, the car and its place in US culture, cultural understandings of the emotions, popular photography and ideas of race and gender in the U.S., and changes in local democracy with economic restructuring in the last part of the 20th century.

Each of these diverse subjects share relevance to the question of how to better understand power and inequality as they are culturally articulated. For the last 15 years, my research has focused on questions of militaries, war, and society. Through research around military bases in North Carolina, Guam, Okinawa, South Korea, and the Philippines, I have examined the impact of military spending and military practice on communities in political economic and cultural historical perspective. A large collaborative project on the costs of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is ongoing (costsofwar.org). With an interest in the relevance of anthropological research for social change efforts, some of my research has been conducted for service and activist organizations, including the United Nations, Guam's criminal justice system, a domestic violence shelter, Cultural Survival, and the American Friends Service Committee.