David Griffith – Department of Coastal Studies
About Me
David Griffith has been conducting ethnographic research on labor, migration, and small-scale fisheries and farming in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Arctic, and the United States since the early 1980s. His work has resulted in seven books and dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles, chapters in edited volumes, book reviews, and review articles, along with technical reports, posters, government documents, conference presentations, policy reports, and appearances in the national media. He regularly consults for government agencies and private foundations. In 2012, building on a long tradition of securing external funding, he was awarded his seventh grant from the National Science Foundation to study Managed Migration and the Value of Labor in Guatemala and Mexico. This project evolved out of a seminar sponsored by the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which also resulted in his forthcoming edited volume: Mismanaging Managed Migration: Captive Labor in North American Labor Markets. Another of his books, The Estuary’s Gift: An Atlantic Coast Cultural Biography, won second place in the James Mooney Award, given by the Society for Southern Anthropology. He has been editor-in-chief of The Anthropology of Work Review and Human Organization and is currently the Associate Editor for Public Anthropology for American Anthropologist. Griffith also writes fiction and creative essays, publishing in literary journals. He has been married to Nancy for thirty-seven years and they have two daughters and four grandchildren. He is currently working on a series of essays about poignant fieldwork experiences in Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Arctic, and several other locations where he has conducted research, tentatively entitled, Field Days.