University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

A specialist in European studies, cultural anthropologist Deborah Reed-Danahay has turned her attention to another culture: Vietnam. Photo: NANCY J. PARISI

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By DAVID J. HILL

Published: April 28, 2011

She’s a specialist in French social theory, but she’s not averse to loading hay into wagons on farms in rural Auvergne, France. And sometimes, she milks the cows, too.

Deborah Reed-Danahay is perhaps among the more hands-on researchers you’ll meet at UB. She’s also incredibly busy.

A cultural anthropologist, Reed-Danahay is finishing her third year as a professor in the Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences, where she specializes in European studies. She says she’s interested primarily in the ways that the French nation and the European Union affect the everyday lives of citizens and the ways that people, in turn, respond to these wider institutional structures and processes.

While she calls Buffalo home, Reed-Danahay still visits the rural French community that was the focus of her previous work. She has added a new culture to her studies, one that she began researching near the end of her 12-year tenure at the University of Texas-Arlington, where she taught before coming to UB. Her recent work centers on Vietnamese immigrants in the U.S., and is the topic of her forthcoming book.

Titled “Civic Engagements: The Citizenship Practices of Asian Indian and Vietnamese Immigrants,” it’s a collaboration with Caroline B. Brettell, a colleague from Southern Methodist University.

Scheduled to be published this fall by Stanford University Press, the book is based on the Asian Indian and Vietnamese populations in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. “That’s a new direction for me. My research before that was all in Europe,” Reed-Danahay says.

“When I was thinking about which Asian group I would study, the Vietnamese…seemed to make the most sense to me because of the connection between Vietnam and France,” she says. “Vietnam had been a French colony and so my intention was always to go back to France and do comparative work on Vietnamese immigrants.”

Reed-Danahay is highly regarded for her work in autoethnography, the study of personal narratives that combine ethnographic perspectives. She has studied and published essays on the memoirs of former French peasants, who write about their experiences much like a professional anthropologist would.

She says her work shatters the perceptions of what cultural anthropologists do.

“There’s this stereotype that when you work in France, people say, ‘Oh, it must be so nice.’ They think I hang out in cafes drinking espresso and smoking Gauloises cigarettes,” she says with a laugh. “They’re surprised to find out that I actually help put hay on the hay wagons and milk cows.”

There’s also the stereotype that anthropologists work on remote islands or among non-Western cultures. In the 1970s, Europe garnered the interest of more anthropologists, including Reed-Danahay, who was a founding member of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association that promotes the anthropological study of European societies and cultures. Last fall, she was elected to a two-year term as president of the section.

“What we try to do is build networks among scholars, both in North America and across the Atlantic,” Reed-Danahay says.

She also founded the Center for European Studies at UB last year. The center is holding a conference on April 28 and 29 titled “Realizing Europe: The Lisbon Treaty in Perspective.”

The center’s relevance is significant, not only to UB’s standing as a premier research university, but to the region, which has a history of European immigration, Reed-Danahay says.

She and her family moved to Buffalo in 2006 when she joined the faculty at Buffalo State College as chair of the anthropology department. She moved to UB two years later.

She says she was drawn to UB because of the university’s interest in building European studies as a focus of the anthropology department, and because of the UB 2020 strategic plan, which she says, will enhance the university’s global scope.

Always busy, Reed-Danahay continues to work on projects and look ahead to what’s on the horizon. She’s currently at work on a second book on famed French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu.

Then there’s the project of restoring to its Victorian origins the home in the Parkside area of Buffalo that she owns with her husband, Martin Danahay, a professor of English and director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Brock University in St. Catharines. It was the first home Buffalo businessman Darwin D. Martin built after he married.

The couple has two children, Emily, 26, and Ian, 22, both of whom followed their parents to the area.

Reed-Danahay’s range of projects reflects the variety of her interests. As an undergraduate during the 1970s, she says she struggled finding a major because she was intrigued by so many areas of study.

“I found anthropology to be a discipline that is so interdisciplinary itself, and within anthropology there were so many possibilities with what I could do,” she says.

“I can’t really explain how much it opens your mind to other people and other ways of life.”