Professor and Chair of Anthropology
University of Virginia
Professor Jim Igoe is a faculty member in the Anthropology Department. He is the author of two books: Conservation and Globalization (2004) and The Nature of Spectacle (2017), both of which draw from his work with communities in northern Tanzania and the western United States. The first engages ways in which Western ideals of pristine of wilderness have been imposed on landscapes and indigenous communities around the world, and the resulting displacements and ecological paradoxes. The second outlines ways in which the processes have become intertwined with a powerful vision of Nature in which economic growth and ecosystem health appear as mutually necessitating processes. Jim Igoe also appears in the film A Place without People (2009), a critical history of Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. He is a co-convener of the UVA African Urbanism Humanities Lab and a faculty fellow of the UVA Mellon Indigenous Arts Program. His courses include Introduction to Anthropology, Imagining Africa, The Nature of Nature, History and Theory of Anthropology, and Indigenous Landscapes.