I have done long-term anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, and Scandinavia, and have published books and articles on topics ranging from language death to fat pornography.
My focus on vulnerability as a resource arose out of my fieldwork with adults with significant disabilities in Denmark and Sweden. The women and men I worked with during that research taught me that the commonplace view of vulnerability as a lack is profoundly misguided. This argument is developed in detail in the book Loneliness and its Opposite: sex, disability, and the ethics of engagement, and is the perspective on vulnerability that anchors the EV program.
A few years ago, I published a memoir of my thirty years of linguistic anthropological work in Papua New Guinea. Titled A Death in the Rainforest: how a language and a way of life came to an end in Papua New Guinea, the book has received many positive reviews.
Anyone interested in the linguistic nitty-gritty of the language discussed in the Death book will want to check out A Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap: the life and death of a Papuan language, written together with Angela Terill. That book also appeared in June 2019, published by Mouton De Gruyter.
My interest in vulnerable others has recently led me to explore human-animal communication. The inability of animals to speak means that they force humans who wish to attempt to discover their subjective states (in order, for example, to improve their welfare), to find ways of communicating with them, and understanding them. My latest article on that topic appeared last year in Anthropology Now.
I recently received an ERC Advanced Grant to lead a 5-year research project on people who are treated as though they aren’t really there. My new project partly overlaps with vulnerability as a productive resource, but it extends it in new directions by including people such as courtroom interpreters, who in many senses are not really there but whose work facilitates interactions and communication; and peer reviewers, whose effacement is essential to the institutions that depend on their labor. How is imperceptibility achieved, and what advantages and rewards does it provide?
Contact information: don.kulick@antro.uu.se
Selected publications:
Monographs
Anthologies
Articles
| 2024 | “Laughing with” or “laughing at” people with disabilities? Love on the Spectrum and Derek. HUMOR, 2024. Read article |
| 2023 | The smugness of privilege. American Ethnologist 1–6. Read article |
| 2022 | Recension av boken Den Övre Luftens Gudar—hur en grupp nytänkande antropologer förändrade vår syn på ras och kön, av Charles King. Respons 4/5, s. 90-92. |
| 2022 | Cool hand Don. Cultural Anthropology. Read article |
| 2022 | Butler and political (in)correctness. In Philosophy on Fieldwork: case studies in anthropological analysis, edited by Nils Bubandt and Thomas Schwartz Wenter. London: Routledge, pp. 118-137. |
| 2022 | The sociolinguistics of responsibility. In Struggles for Multilingualism and Linguistic Citizenship, edited by Quentin Williams, Ana Deumert & T Milani. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 201-217. |
| 2022 | “Stop thinking you know what to expect”. In Kritiska blickar från marginalen: Reflektioner i spåren av Jens Rydström, edited by Andrés Brink Pinto, Lund University Press, pp. 237-248. |
| 2021 | When Animals Talk Back. Anthropology Now, 13(2). |
| 2020 | On the vicissitudes of publishing, and on the riskiness of humor. Hau: Journal of Anthropological Theory, Vol 10 (2): 664-669; https://doi.org/10.1086/709905 |
| 2019 | Vulnerable erotic subjects. Sexualities. DOI: 10.1177/1363460719861817 |
| 2019 | The shames of men. Longreads. https://longreads.com/2019/06/26/the-shames-of-men/ |
| 2019 | Foreword to special issue on “Transgender and Language”, edited by Emilia di Martino and Luise von Flotow, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 256: 1-3. |
| 2018 | New introduction to reprint of the article “The gender of Brazilian transgendered prostitutes”. In Transgender Sex Work and Society, edited by Larry Nuttbrock. New York: Harrington Park Press, 236-240. |
| 2018 | Why animal orgasm matters to our moral universe. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/why-animal-orgasm-matters-to-our-moral-universe-87782 |
| 2017 | Is it monologic? Is it dialogic? Does it matter? In The Monological Imagination, edited by Matt Tomlinson & Julian Millie. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 81-88. |
| 2017 | Humorless lesbians. Anthologized in Gender: Laughter. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks, edited by Bettina Papenburg, Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 229-244. |
| 2017 | Jouir comme des bêtes. Terrain, 67: 110-127, special issue on “Orgasm”. |
| 2016 | Humorless lesbians. Reprinted in English and translated into Italian as “La rappresenatzione delle lesbiche prive di senso dell’umorismo” in De Genere: revista di studi letterare, postcoloniali e di genere, 2. |
| 2015 | When Privacy and Secrecy Collapse into One Another, Bad Things Can Happen. Current Anthropology Volume 56, Supplement 12, S241-50. Read article |
| 2014 | Humorless lesbians. In Gender and Humor: interdisciplinary and international perspectives, edited by Delia Chiaro and Raffaella Baccolini. London: Routledge, 85-99. Read article |
| 2014 | Language and desire. In The Handbook of Language, Gender and Sexuality, Second Edition, edited by Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Myerhoff and Janet Holmes, Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, 68-84. Read article |
| 2014 | Muscle and blood: erotic fantasy in theory and practice. In Selves, Symbols and Sexualities: an Interactionist Anthology, edited by Thomas Weinberg and Staci Newmahr. London and New York: Sage, 17-31. |
| 2012 | En unken och beklaglig människosyn: män, sex och funktionshinder [A fusty outlook on mankind: men, sex and disabilities]. In Andra män: maskulinitet, normskapande och jämställdhet, edited by Lucas Gottzén and Rickard Jonsson. Gleerups: Malmö, 25-44. Read article |
| 2009 | Can there be an anthropology of homophobia? In Homophobias: lust and loathing across time and space, edited by David Murray. Durham: Duke University Press, 19-33. Read article |
| 2009 | Sex, soccer and scandal in Brazil. Anthropology Now 1 (3): 32-42. Read article |
| 2009 | Gender Politics. Men and Masculinities 11 (2): 186-92. Special issue on “Men Doing the Anthropology of Women”, edited by David Berliner and Douglas Falen. Read article |
| 2009 | Fat Pets. In Fat Studies in the UK, edited by Corinna Tomrley and Ann Kaloski Naylor. York: Raw Nerve Books, 35-50. Read article |
| 2008 | Cool heads and hot hearts. Sexualities 11 (1-2): 80-86. Read article |
| 2008 | Don Kulick om djurporr [Don Kulick on animal porn]. In F-ordet: mot en ny feminism, edited by Petra Östergren. Stockholm: Alfabeta, 75-86. Read article |
| 2007 | Anthropologists are talking: about feminism and anthropology. Transcribed and edited interview with Louise Lamphere, Rayna Rapp and Gayle Rubin. Ethnos 72 (3): 408-26. Read article |
| 2006 | Theory in furs: masochist anthropology. Current Anthropology 47 (6): 933-52. Read article |
| 2006 | Ensamhetens gränser: onani och socialitet [The limits of solitude: masturbation and sociality]. In Den Moderna Ensamheten [Loneliness and Modernity], edited by Maria Karlsson and Sharon Rider. Stockholm: Symposion, 69-92. Read article |
| 2005 | Four hundred thousand Swedish perverts. GLQ 11 (2): 205-35. Read article |
| 2005 | Identity crisis? (with D. Cameron). Language and Communication 25: 107-25. Read article |
| 2004 | Language socialization (with Bambi Schieffelin). In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Alessandro Duranti, Oxford: Blackwell, 349-68. Read article |
| 2003 | Sex in the new Europe: the criminalization of clients and Swedish fear of penetration. Anthropological Theory 3 (2):199-218. Read article |
| 1997 | A man in the house: the boyfriends of Brazilian travesti prostitutes. Social Text 52/53, 15 (3-4):135-162. Read article |
| 2003 | Scandalous acts: the politics of shame among Brazilian travesti prostitutes. (with C. Klein). In Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Agency and Power, edited by Barbara Hobson. Cambridge: CUP, 215-238. Read article |
| 2000 | Gay & lesbian language. Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 243-85. Read article |
| 1999 | Transgender and language: a review of the literature and suggestions for the future. GLQ 5(4):605-622. Read article |
| 1998 | Anger, gender, language shift, and the politics of revelation in a Papua New Guinean village. In Language Ideologies: Theory and Practice, edited by Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard and Paul Kroskrity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 87-102. Read article |
| 1998 | Fe/male trouble: the unsettling place of lesbians in the self images of Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. Sexualities 1(3): 299-312. Read article |
| 1997 | The gender of Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. American Anthropologist 99(3): 574-585. Read article |
| 1996 | Causing a commotion: public scandal as resistance among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. Anthropology Today 12(6): 3-7. Read article |
| 1994 | Rambo's wife saves the day: subjegating the gaze and subverting the narrative in a New Guinean swamp. (with Margaret Willson). Visual Anthropology Review 10 (2): 1-13. Read article |
| 1993 | Conceptions and uses of literacy in a Papua New Guinean village (with Christopher Stroud). In Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy, edited by Brian Street, Cambridge: CUP, 30-61. Read article |
| 1993 | Heroes from Hell: representations of ‘rascals’ in a Papua New Guinean village. Anthropology Today 9 (3): 9-14. Read article |
| 1993 | Speaking as a woman: structure and gender in domestic arguments in a Papua New Guinean village. Cultural Anthropology 8 (3): 99-129. Read article |
| 1990 | Christianity, cargo and ideas of self: patterns of literacy in a Papua New Guinean village (with Christopher Stroud). Man 25:286-303. Read article |
Recent book reviews
| 2022 | Recension av boken Den Övre Luftens Gudar—hur en grupp nytänkande antropologer förändrade vår syn på ras och kön, av Charles King. Respons 4/5, s. 90-92. |
| 2021 | Don Kulick. Review of Ethnopornography: sexuality, colonialism and archival knowledge, edited by Pete Sigal, Zeb Tortorici, and Neil L. Whitehead. Journal of Anthropological Research Vol 77 (2): 283-286; https://doi.org/10.1086/713636 |
| 2020 | Don Kulick. Engaging anthropology: a review of Kenyan, Christian, Queer: religion, LGBT activism and arts of resistance in Africa, Adriaan van Klinken. Hau: Journal of Anthropological Theory, Vol 10 (2): 630-632; https://doi.org/10.1086/709581 |
