Laurie LaPorte
Lecturer, Fall 2008
Department of Anthropology
Brandeis University
P.O. Box 549110, MS 006
Waltham, MA 02454-9110
AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION
Globalization, identity and ethnicity, practice theory, migration, field methods, children and youth, gender studies, love, gossip, Cape Verde, African diaspora, Atlantic Islands.
Background and Description
Laurie LaPorte is a cultural anthropologist whose primary ethnographic research has been carried out in the Cape Verde islands and among Cape Verdean populations in Massachusetts. She began her training in Anthropology and Psychology at Yale University and took a more hands-on approach to understanding the lives and experiences of others through a two year term as a Peace Corps health volunteer in the Cape Verde islands from 1995-97. She returned to the West African archipelago in 2000 and again in 2003-04, studying the ways in which young Cape Verdeans grow up in a “culture of migration,” defining emigration as a primary life goal and self-identifying as a uniquely mixed people who encompass peoples and cultures from all parts of the world. In her dissertation, “The Continuities of Modernity: Cape Verdean Identity and Emigration,” she explores in particular the ways in which young people construct a sense of the self through fashion and popular culture, often incorporating foreign goods and ideas according to local gender, social and racial ideologies. She earned her PhD from Boston University in 2007 and has taught courses in Medical Anthropology, Gender studies, Identity and Ethnicity and socio-cultural theory at Boston University, the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the Boston Architectural College. She lives in Cambridge, is an avid Red Sox fan and enjoys travel, gardening and cooking.