Catherine L. Besteman
Catherine Lowe Besteman is an anthropologist and holds the position of Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She has taught at that institution since 1994. Since 2005, she is known for her work with Somali Bantu refugees who have migrated from East Africa to Lewiston, Maine. Early life and education. Besteman received her BA from Amherst College, and her MA and PhD from the University of Arizona. Career. Besteman’s areas of expertise include refugees, southern Somalia, South Africa, and, more generally, insecurity and violence, and inequality  and racism. She also specializes in studying humanitarianism and activism. She writes in support of an engaged approach to anthropology, which involves advocacy, teaching, and collaboration with the people who are the focus of study. Besteman has studied Southern Somalia extensively, and has written a number of books and papers about this area. She has criticized traditional anthropological and media portrayals of Somalis and of the Somalian civil war since it began in the early 1990s, and her opinions and methods are considered to be controversial by some anthropologists. Research and work. Besteman began working in southern Somalia in the  late eighties before the outbreak of civil war in 1991. Many refugees from the communities where she had worked in Somalia have resettled in Lewiston, Maine. Under her direction, members of the local Bantu community and Colby College students have produced a wiki-type website about the Somali Bantus of Lewiston. A museum exhibition: "Rivers of Immigration: Peoples of the Androscoggin" was mounted at the Museum L-A, in conjunction with the wiki project, from 2009 to 2010. During the 2000s, Besteman studied Cape Town, South Africa, focusing on the work of grassroots organizations in the city after the end  of apartheid. Her book "Transforming Cape Town" (2008) describes several of these organizations and contrasts incidents of traditionalism with those of innovation. Besteman received a Guggenheim Foundation grant and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship in 2012 to work on a book project. In late 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded her a residency for spring 2014. Besteman has co-edited two books for general readership: "Why America’s Top Pundits are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back" (2005), and "The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It" (2009).