Social Justice & Community
Anthropologist Donald L. Brenneis Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Brenneis is a linguistic and social anthropologist who studies the relationship between language and politics and how communication shapes and transforms communities.
UC Santa Cruz Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology Donald L. Brenneis was recently selected among the roughly 250 new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780, the academy is both an honorary society that recognizes and celebrates the excellence of its members and an independent research center convening leaders from across disciplines, professions, and perspectives to address significant challenges.
“Becoming a member of the academy was a total surprise, and a quite wonderful one,” Brenneis said. “Especially in the current world, organizations that catalyze and sustain research, deliberation, and outreach are invaluable. The academy clearly provides a space and structure that makes truly multidisciplinary conversation and practice possible.”
Brenneis is a linguistic and social anthropologist whose work has focused on the social life of communicative practices, whether linguistic, musical, performative, or textual. He worked in a South Asian diasporic community in Fiji over a 20-year period, examining the relationships among language, music, conflict, law, and politics. His research explored children’s arguments, men’s gossip, and the complexities of managing conflict through indirect speech.
More recently he has been doing ethnographic work—both as participant and as observer—on peer review, scholarly publishing, assessment practices, higher education policy, and the ongoing shaping of scholarly and scientific knowledge within and beyond anthropology. At the heart of his research has always been an interest in the relationship between language and politics and a core concern with the question of how talk and other forms of communication make a difference in shaping and transforming communities.
Brenneis joined the UC Santa Cruz Anthropology Department in 1996 and retired in 2019. Over the course of his career, he has also served as editor of American Ethnologist, president of the American Anthropological Association, co-chair of the editorial committee of the University of California Press, co-editor of Annual Review of Anthropology, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
“During his time at UC Santa Cruz, Professor Brenneis was much beloved by students and colleagues, as a linguistic anthropologist who applied his keen eye to bureaucratic practices, including academic review committees,” said Anthropology Department Chair Andrew Mathews. “He was also an amazing mentor of junior scholars, including myself.”