Catherine Bolten

Associate Professor
Director of Doctoral Studies for the Kroc Institute for International Studies,
Anthropology; Peace Studies

Research Interests

structural violence, inequality, youth, food security, human rights

Related Courses Taught

Structural Violence, The Politics of Health and Disease in Africa, Ethnographic Methods

Biography

Professor Bolten is a development anthropologist whose interests range from understanding youth aspiration in the wake of civil war to the politics of chimpanzee conservation in unprotected forest fragments. She has conducted research in Sierra Leone since 2003, and in Botswana from 1996 to 2002. She teaches in the anthropology program and in the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, is also a fellow in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and is a concurrent Associate Professor in Africana Studies. Professor Bolten is also a member of the Eck Institute for Global Health, and is a core faculty member of the Keough School for Global Affairs, which houses the institutes.

Dr. Bolten has been working in Sierra Leone since 2003, focusing first on issues of memory, poverty, morality, and post-war development. Her first book I Did It to Save My Life: Love and Survival in Sierra Leone (2012) is part of the University of California Press Series in Public Anthropology. Her second book, Serious Youth in Sierra Leone: An Ethnography of Performance and Global Connection, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. The book focuses on the material practices of youth who, instead of wanting to overthrow or change a patronage system widely credited with causing the war, instead yearn to belong to it. This bid to be taken “seriously” is misinterpreted by adults who feel threatened by young people’s facility with technology and the trappings of globalization, causing intergenerational friction.

SInce 2014 Bolten has been involved in the Tonkolili Chimpanzee Project in central Sierra Leone, where she has been investigating the nexus between food insecurity, population growth and migration, land degradation, and wildlife competition. The first outputs from that project have been published in the edited volume Living WIth Animals, and in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, with several more expected in the coming years. Her emerging interests center on recreational drug use among young people, a project that is still in its infancy.

Bolten was a member of the international Ebola Anthropology Emergency Task Force, and co-edited a special issue on Ebola for Anthropological Quarterly in 2017. She has consulted for the United Nations World Food Programme and Physicians for Social Responsibility, and has conducted extensive fieldwork on ethnobotany, eco-tourism, and development in Botswana. Her articles appear in American Anthropologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Anthropological Quarterly, and The Journal of Human Rights, among many others.