Johannes Fabian

Johannes Fabian received his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago and is professor emeritus of cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Previously, he taught at Northwestern and Wesleyan Universities and at the National University of Zaire in Lubumbashi. He held numerous visiting professorships in the USA and Europe and was a fellow at, among others, the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica, the Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford, and the IFK- Internationales Zentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna. He did research on religious movements, language, work, and popular culture in the Shaba mining region of Zaire (1966-7, 1972-4, 1985, 1986). In his theoretical and critical work, he addressed questions of epistemology and of the history of anthropology. Most recently he has been interested in questions regarding virtual ethnographic archives (see http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/).

His books include History from Below (1990), Power and Performance (1990), Language and Colonial Power (1986, 1991), Time and the Work of Anthropology (1991), Remembering the Present. Painting and Popular History in Zaire (1996), Moments of Freedom. Anthropology and Popular culture (1998), Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (2000) Anthropology with an Attitude. Critical Essays (2001), Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object (Second Edition, 2002), Memory against Culture. Arguments and Reminders (2007), Ethnography as Commentary. Writing from the Virtual Archive (2008).