Hugh Gusterson

Hugh Gusterson is an anthropologist currently at George Mason University.^[1]

His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security and the anthropology of science.

His work appeared in American Scientist.^[2] He is a regular contributor to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.^[3]

Biography

Hugh Gusterson grew up in England. He has a B.A. in history from Cambridge University, a Master's degree in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in anthropology from Stanford University. He taught at MIT from 1992-2006 before moving to George Mason University. One of the founders of the anthropology of science, his early work was on the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists. More recently he has written on counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. A leading critic of attempts to recruit anthropologists for counterinsurgency work, he is one of the founders of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.

He is married to Allison MacFarlane and has two children.

Works

• Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, University of California Press, 1998, ISBN 9780520213739
• People of the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex, University of Minnesota Press, 2004, ISBN 9780816638604

Editor

• Why America's top pundits are wrong: anthropologists talk back, editors Catherine Lowe Besteman, Hugh Gusterson, University of California Press, 2005, ISBN 9780520243569
• The insecure American: how we got here and what we should do about it, editors Hugh Gusterson, Catherine Lowe Besteman, University of California Press, 2009, ISBN 9780520259690
• Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, editors Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duvall, University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
• The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual: Or, Notes on Demilitarizing Anthropology, edited by Network of Concerned Anthropologists, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009

Chapters

• "Remembering Hiroshima at a Nuclear Weapons Laboratory", Living with the bomb: American and Japanese cultural conflicts in the Nuclear Age, editors Laura Elizabeth Hein, Mark Selden,M.E. Sharpe, 1997, ISBN 9781563249679
• "Nuclear Weapons Testing", Naked science: anthropological inquiry into boundaries, power, and knowledge, editor Laura Nader, Psychology Press, 1996, ISBN 9780415914659
• "Becoming a Weapons Scientist", Technoscientific imaginaries: conversations, profiles, and memoirs, editor George E. Marcus, University of Chicago Press, 1995, ISBN 9780226504445
• "A Pedagogy of Diminishing Returns: Scientific Involution across Three Generations of Nuclear Weapons Science", Pedagogy and the practice of science: historical and contemporary perspectives, editor David Kaiser, MIT Press, 2005, ISBN 9780262112888
• "Missing the End of the Cold War in International Security", Cultures of insecurity: states, communities, and the production of danger, editor Jutta Weldes, U of Minnesota Press, 1999, ISBN 9780816633081

References