George Paul Meiu
George Paul Meiu is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel. He is an Associate of the Department of African and African American Studies and the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, where, until 2022, he has been a tenured, full professor. Meiu’s research and teaching focus on sexuality, gender, and kinship; ethnicity, belonging and citizenship; mobility, memory, and materiality; and the political economy of postcolonial East Africa and postsocialist Eastern Europe.
Meiu is author of Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2017), a book that won the Ruth Benedict Prize and the Nelson Graburn Prize of the American Anthropological Association. Combining ethnographic and historical methods, the book explores how the tourist commodification of ethnic sexuality shapes how postcolonial subjects negotiate belonging and relations of age, gender, and kinship in Kenya.
In his forthcoming book, Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya, Meiu explores new ways of thinking about homophobia and rampant violence against queer people by taking as its point of departure objects whose poetic deployment in rumor, political rhetoric, and everyday life constitutes the homosexual body as an imaginary target of repudiation.
Meiu is also coeditor of Ethnicity, Commodity, In/Corporation (Indiana University Press, 2020), a book that examines the growing global entanglements of ethnicity in market dynamics, nationalism, and consumption. He is also author of the Romanian-language monograph Vin feciorii cu turca! Schimbări semiologice în obiceiurile cetei de feciori din Comăna (Arania, 2004), a historical ethnography of a youths’ ritual in southeastern Transylvania, Romania, that has been pivotal to nationalist, communist, and post-socialist political imaginaries.
His work appeared the American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnos, HAU, and Anthropology Today and in edited volumes on tourism, bodies, sexuality, futures, and the history of anthropology.
Meiu holds a BA in anthropology from Concordia University in Montreal and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago, where he won the Daniel F. Nugent Prize for the best dissertation in historical anthropology.
Address: Institute of Social Anthropology
University of Basel
Münsterplatz 19
4055 Basel, Switzerland
Meiu is author of Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2017), a book that won the Ruth Benedict Prize and the Nelson Graburn Prize of the American Anthropological Association. Combining ethnographic and historical methods, the book explores how the tourist commodification of ethnic sexuality shapes how postcolonial subjects negotiate belonging and relations of age, gender, and kinship in Kenya.
In his forthcoming book, Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya, Meiu explores new ways of thinking about homophobia and rampant violence against queer people by taking as its point of departure objects whose poetic deployment in rumor, political rhetoric, and everyday life constitutes the homosexual body as an imaginary target of repudiation.
Meiu is also coeditor of Ethnicity, Commodity, In/Corporation (Indiana University Press, 2020), a book that examines the growing global entanglements of ethnicity in market dynamics, nationalism, and consumption. He is also author of the Romanian-language monograph Vin feciorii cu turca! Schimbări semiologice în obiceiurile cetei de feciori din Comăna (Arania, 2004), a historical ethnography of a youths’ ritual in southeastern Transylvania, Romania, that has been pivotal to nationalist, communist, and post-socialist political imaginaries.
His work appeared the American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnos, HAU, and Anthropology Today and in edited volumes on tourism, bodies, sexuality, futures, and the history of anthropology.
Meiu holds a BA in anthropology from Concordia University in Montreal and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago, where he won the Daniel F. Nugent Prize for the best dissertation in historical anthropology.
Address: Institute of Social Anthropology
University of Basel
Münsterplatz 19
4055 Basel, Switzerland
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (45)
Uploads
Books by George Paul Meiu
Campaigns calling on police and citizens to purge their countries of homosexuality have taken hold across the world. But the “homosexual threat” they claim to be addressing is not always easy to identify. To make that threat visible, leaders, media, and civil society groups have deployed certain objects as signifiers of queerness. In Kenya, bead necklaces, plastics, and diapers more generally have come to represent the danger posed by homosexual behavior to an essentially “virile” construction of national masculinity.
In Queer Objects tothe Rescue, George Paul Meiu explores objects that have played an important and surprising role in both state-led and popular attempts to rid Kenya of homosexuality. Meiu shows that their use in the political imaginary has been crucial to representing the homosexual body as a societal threat and as a target of outrage, violence, and exclusion, while also crystallizing anxieties over wider political and economic instability. To effectively understand and critique homophobia, Meiu suggests, we must take these objects seriously, and recognize them as potential sources for new forms of citizenship, intimacy, resistance, and belonging.
George Paul Meiu uses his deep familiarity with the communities these men come from to explore the long-term effects of markets of ethnic culture and sexuality on a wide range of aspects of life in rural Kenya, including kinship, ritual, gender, intimate affection, and conceptions of aging. What happens to these communities when young men return with such surprising wealth? And how do they use it to improve their social standing locally? By answering these questions, Ethno-erotic Economies offers a complex look at how intimacy and ethnicity come together to shape the pathways of global and local trade in the postcolonial world.
“Forms of sex that were unheard of, unorthodox circuits of money, and new ways of asserting one’s belonging: Meiu has a true talent for bringing out the unexpected articulations that make present-day developments in Africa so challenging. New opportunities teach Samburu morans to use their ostentatious masculinity for making money on the Kenyan beaches with dramatic consequences back home. Ethno-erotic Economies is a fascinating study not only because of its theme but also due to the eloquent interaction between vivid ethnography and seminal interpretations.” Peter Geschiere, author of The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa
“Ethno-erotic Economies is a brilliant book—beautifully written, ethnographically rich, and theoretically provocative. Meiu explores the radical and rapid changes in Samburu economies, sexualities, and gender and generational relations with sensitivity, empathy, and an astute analytical sensibility. This is a must-read for scholars and students alike in African studies, sexuality studies, and anthropology.” Dorothy Hodgson, author of Gender, Justice, and the Problem of Culture
“Ethno-erotic Economies is a stunning ethnographic achievement. Meiu’s exploration of how ethnicity, gender, money, and intimacy shape dynamics of belonging and value in contemporary Kenya speaks to important debates in African Studies, queer studies, and anthropological inquiry in the broadest sense.” Tom Boellstorff, author of A Coincidence of Desires
Papers by George Paul Meiu
Book Reviews by George Paul Meiu
Campaigns calling on police and citizens to purge their countries of homosexuality have taken hold across the world. But the “homosexual threat” they claim to be addressing is not always easy to identify. To make that threat visible, leaders, media, and civil society groups have deployed certain objects as signifiers of queerness. In Kenya, bead necklaces, plastics, and diapers more generally have come to represent the danger posed by homosexual behavior to an essentially “virile” construction of national masculinity.
In Queer Objects tothe Rescue, George Paul Meiu explores objects that have played an important and surprising role in both state-led and popular attempts to rid Kenya of homosexuality. Meiu shows that their use in the political imaginary has been crucial to representing the homosexual body as a societal threat and as a target of outrage, violence, and exclusion, while also crystallizing anxieties over wider political and economic instability. To effectively understand and critique homophobia, Meiu suggests, we must take these objects seriously, and recognize them as potential sources for new forms of citizenship, intimacy, resistance, and belonging.
George Paul Meiu uses his deep familiarity with the communities these men come from to explore the long-term effects of markets of ethnic culture and sexuality on a wide range of aspects of life in rural Kenya, including kinship, ritual, gender, intimate affection, and conceptions of aging. What happens to these communities when young men return with such surprising wealth? And how do they use it to improve their social standing locally? By answering these questions, Ethno-erotic Economies offers a complex look at how intimacy and ethnicity come together to shape the pathways of global and local trade in the postcolonial world.
“Forms of sex that were unheard of, unorthodox circuits of money, and new ways of asserting one’s belonging: Meiu has a true talent for bringing out the unexpected articulations that make present-day developments in Africa so challenging. New opportunities teach Samburu morans to use their ostentatious masculinity for making money on the Kenyan beaches with dramatic consequences back home. Ethno-erotic Economies is a fascinating study not only because of its theme but also due to the eloquent interaction between vivid ethnography and seminal interpretations.” Peter Geschiere, author of The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa
“Ethno-erotic Economies is a brilliant book—beautifully written, ethnographically rich, and theoretically provocative. Meiu explores the radical and rapid changes in Samburu economies, sexualities, and gender and generational relations with sensitivity, empathy, and an astute analytical sensibility. This is a must-read for scholars and students alike in African studies, sexuality studies, and anthropology.” Dorothy Hodgson, author of Gender, Justice, and the Problem of Culture
“Ethno-erotic Economies is a stunning ethnographic achievement. Meiu’s exploration of how ethnicity, gender, money, and intimacy shape dynamics of belonging and value in contemporary Kenya speaks to important debates in African Studies, queer studies, and anthropological inquiry in the broadest sense.” Tom Boellstorff, author of A Coincidence of Desires