James Ferguson

James Ferguson was an American anthropologist, born in 1959, who chaired the anthropology department at Stanford University after an earlier faculty position at the University of California, Irvine. His best known book, The Anti-Politics Machine (1990), examined a World Bank development project in Lesotho and argued that development institutions systematically depoliticize poverty by treating it as a technical problem to be solved by outside experts rather than a product of political and economic relations. His later work, including Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (2006) and Give a Man a Fish (2015), turned to the anthropology of labor, welfare and basic income programs in southern Africa. He delivered the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture, anthropology's most prestigious lecture series, in 2009. He died in February 2025.