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Casey Golomski

Affiliated Institutions

University of Massachusetts Boston

Casey Golomski is a cultural anthropologist whose research collocates the roles of religion and medicine in social reproduction. In writing and multimedia productions he interrogates a range of topics from classical foci of kinship, exchange, and life cycle rites to contemporary phenomena like insurance markets, life expectancy statistics, and performance in the workplace (choirs, drama, team-building rituals). In teaching, he is committed to using African-authored biographies, fiction, and media to complement ethnographies and histories written by Africans and people of color. Geographically, he focuses on Southern and West Africa and the United States.

Areas of Research

religion, medicine, social reproduction

Publications

Golomski, Casey. “Crisis, Risk, Control: Anthropologies of Insurance.” Anthropology News (2013) 54(9-10):10-11.

Golomski, Casey. “Rites of Passage in Africa, 1900-Present.” Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia and Africa, edited by Andrea Stanton, et al., 365-367. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2012.

Projects

Swaziland

Faith Without Work is Dead: Social Reproduction in Swaziland's Age of HIV/AIDS

This book project describes a crisis of generational succession and social reproduction in the Kingdom of Swaziland, the last absolute monarchy in Africa facing deathly rates of HIV. Focusing on the lives, life cycle rites, and everyday practices of ordinary families, this book shows how people engage multiple churches, humanitarian and global health organizations, and consumer markets through indigenized religious concepts of action to forge pathways unto the future, Heaven and a better life.

KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Age of Dependency: Negotiating the Meaning of the Life Course through Social Assistance in South African Households

This project explores how contrasting, changing models of public and private assistance affect normative frameworks about age and the life course for recipients and their dependents. It assesses how meanings of persons' social status and roles relative to their life stage are shored up or change through public versus private assistance, and how intergenerational dependency is revalued in its consumption and distribution.

Atlantic Ocean

Age of Dependency: Negotiating the Meaning of the Life Course through Social Assistance in South African Households

This project explores how contrasting, changing models of public and private assistance affect normative frameworks about age and the life course for recipients and their dependents. It assesses how meanings of persons' social status and roles relative to their life stage are shored up or change through public versus private assistance, and how intergenerational dependency is revalued in its consumption and distribution.