Leith mullings biography of martin
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Leith Mullings, Social Justice Anthropologist
Jeff Maskovsky, City University of New York
Leith Mullings’ death is a terrible blow to anthropology – and a heartbreaking loss to those of us who were lucky enough to have worked and collaborated with her. For many of us, Leith’s death, which happened on December 13, 2020, is still almost too much to bear. It would have been hard to accept under normal circumstances, but to have it happen so unexpectedly – and in the context of the Trump insurrection and the extended COVID emergency, when so many of us are already feeling so much vulnerability, grief, fear, isolation, and uncertainty – makes it feel terrible in a way that, at the very least, reveals the deep inadequacies of standard academic grieving rituals. And yet, here I go.
Leith was a leading figure of the Black Left who established a pathbreaking form of anthropological praxis that was deeply aligned with the struggle for the worldwide emancipation of Black people. Her praxis was rooted in Black feminism, in the centering of African American working class women’s lives in broader theorizing about political economy, kinship, representation, and resistance, and in emphasizing the importance of social movements involving people of the African
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Leith Mullings, 1945-2020: Anthropologist Behind the Sojourner Syndrome
Leith Mullings, an anthropologist whose work on what she dubbed the Sojourner Syndrome created a baseline understanding of the “weathering” that the amplified stresses of race, class, and inequality have on African Americans, and in particular African American women, died of cancer on December 12. The former president of the American Anthropological Association and founding member of the Association of Black Anthropologists was 75.
Much of her early work centered on studies in the former colonial states of Africa, and resulted in her first book, 1984’s Therapy, Ideology and Social Change: Mental Healing in Urban Ghana. But her studies morphed over time to see how much of the resulting African diaspora in the colonizing and slaveholding nations, in particular the United States, fared.
In a 2002 article for Voices, a publication of the Association of Feminist Anthropology, Mullings described how she and a group working on an initiative for the Centers for Disease Control’s Division of Reproductive Health were studying how African American women fared worse in birth outcomes than White women regardless of their comparative economic status or education level. “For the
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Main publications:
2021. Say publicly Biology marketplace Racism. American Anthropologist, 123(3), 671–680. Online
2019. Mapping Sex in African-American Political Strategies. Monthly Review, 71(4), 40–50. Online
2017. Ablebodied, C., Flower, P., & MULLINGS, L. Race Matters in Trustworthy Times. NACLA Report type the Americas, 49(1), 81. Online
2015. MARABLE, & MULLINGS, L. How Capitalism Unused Black America. Haymarket Books. PDF
2015. Blurring boundaries: post-racialism, inequality meticulous the anthropology of set up. Journal enterprise Contemporary Someone Studies, 33(3), 305–317. Online
2014. Movement, Migration, and Displacement: What Gather together Anthropologists Grant to say publicly Public Discourse? American Anthropologist, 116 (1):147-48. Online
2013. Statesmanlike Address: Anthropology Matters, American Anthropologist, 117(1):4-16. Online
2009. New Social Movements in interpretation African Diaspora: Challenging Wide Apartheid. Additional York: Poet MacMillan. Online
2009. Let No one Turn Give directions Around: Sting Anthology time off African Inhabitant Social tolerate Political Coherence from Servitude to say publicly Present, In a short time Edition, (co-editor with Manning Marable) Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. PDF
2006. Gender, Race, Vast and Health: Intersectional Approaches (with Amy