Kamari Clarke

Yale University Department of Anthropology

Kamari M. Clarke

Professor of Anthropology

Ph.D. University of California, Santa Cruz, 1997

kamari.clarke@yale.edu

Anthropology office address:
10 Sachem Street, Room 224
Tel: (203) 432-3685
Fax: (203) 432-3669

MacMillan Center address:

342 Rosenkranz Hall

Media Page

Website: Yale Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis

Kamari Clarke is a professor of Anthropology and International and Area Studies at Yale University. She is the Chair of the Yale Council on African Studies (with a courtesy appointment in (African American Studies) and is a collaborative partner of the distinguished Leadership Enterprise for African Development (LEAD) – a collaborative project between Harvard and Yale Universities and the Institute for Research on African Women, Children and Culture (IRAWCC) that seeks to deepen the process of reform and revitalization in African countries by strengthening leadership and governance capacity in the public, business, and civil society sectors.

Professor Clarke was educated in her early years in Canada. She graduated with a B.A. in Political Science from Concordia University in 1988. Her graduate work was completed in the United States – an M.A. was from the Department of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research, a Master in the Study of Law from Yale University (MSL), and a Ph.D. (1997) from the University of California, Santa-Cruz. During her academic career she has held numerous prestigious fellowships, grants and awards – a two-year President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, a Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council of Canada fellowship, Ford Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation grants, and in her leadership capacity at Yale University she led her Council into securing a four-year 1.5 million grant US Government Title VI NRC and FLAS grant.

Professor Clarke’s research explores issues related to religious nationalism, legal institutions, international law, the interface between culture, power and globalization, and its relationship to race and modernity. Clarke's research interests have taken her to intentional Yoruba communities in the American South, traditionalist religious and legal domains in Southwestern Nigeria, international criminal tribunals, and international law training sessions in Ireland, London, Geneva, Banjul, The United Nations and beyond. She serves on several scholarly and advisory boards and is the founding director of the Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Yale. Over the years she has lectured throughout various regions of the United States, Canada, West and South Africa, England, and the Caribbean and taught courses on Globalization, Transnationalism, and Modernity, Rethinking Human Rights, Contemporary Social Theory, Religious Nationalism, Race and Empire, and the Anthropology of Religion.

Articles and books have focused on religious and legal movements and the related production of knowledge and power. These have range from the 2004 publication of Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities (Duke University Press) and Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press). Her edited volumes include the 2006 co-edited publication of Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (with Deborah Thomas) (Duke University Press), Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era (with Mark Goodale) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Testimonies and Transformations: Reflections on the Uses of Ethnographic Knowledge (with Rebecca Hardin) (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).

Her current research lies at the intersections between legal and religious knowledge, contemporary crises over the state accommodations of cultural differences and the ways that different cultural agents seek to enforce, legitimatize and authorize decision-making. In this work she explores various cases (constitutional freedoms, asylum, criminal/religious, religious freedoms among inmates) where courts have ruled in one way and those affected by the ruling have mobilized their forces differently. This work is now in manuscript form, entitled Of Dreamers and the Limits of the Law, and aims to explore the fundamental impossibility of the exercise of religious freedoms—especially in relation to criminal, civil asylum and refugee cases.