My passion for anthropology began when I traveled to Mexico as a teenager, and managed to escape the manicured confines of tourist hotels and sites. I walked the small passageways in the local people's market and residential neighborhoods, and felt that I had slipped through a secret doorway into a more complicated and compelling world than what tour operators present to American travelers. From then on I sought to know more about how local people throughout the world experience their day-to-day lives; particularly how they manage their lives in contexts of extreme social and economic differentiation, and increasing global exchange.

Since that early passion I have pursued research on a range of topics, including: child fostering, support systems for the elderly, social and economic factors in migration decision making, impacts of education on family and community, gender and agricultural change, and most recently, links between frontier land settlement and ecological change. The common thread through all of these issues is a concern for practical and pragmatic questions relating social and cultural change to political-economic structures at local, regional, national and international levels. These research interests draw on anthropological theories of household economy, ecology and culture, social organization, political economy, and social demography, as well as theoretical perspectives that emerge from multidisciplinary work linking comparative economics, political science, development and environmental studies, geography, sociology, demography, and gerontology.

Since 1992 I have conducted fieldwork in both rural and urban areas of Zambia, Central Africa. My current research interests include an examination of migration, agriculture and environmental change in national park buffer zones. During the summer of 2001 I took three undergraduate anthropology students from the University of Kentucky to Zambia with me to help collect data, and also to provide an ethnographic "field school" for the students. The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently funded a proposal for continued research in this frontier region. The project is a collaboration with two geographers specializing in environmental change, GIS and remote sensing (Jon Unruh, Indiana University; Rod Hay, Cal State Dominguez Hills), and will examine migrants' land tenure insecurity in relation to deforestation in a frontier farming region bordering Africa's largest national park—Kafue National Park—in central Zambia.

In addition to this new research agenda, I am one of three new members of the longitudinal Gwembe Tonga Research Project (GTRP), started by Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder in 1956. This "next generation" of the GTRP increasingly manages, and determines the direction of this multidisciplinary project, which examines cultural continuity and change in all of its forms and facets. We are currently developing proposals to computerize and manage the fifty years of ethnographic and qualitative Gwembe Tonga data, which will be submitted to a number of foundations including Wenner Gren and NEH. Once computerized, this ethnographic resource will be linked to the demographic database which was systematized under an NSF grant from 1995-1998.

Prior to Zambia and my work with the GTRP, I worked on a medical anthropology project in Haiti focusing on maternal - child health care and community participation. Along with my interests in Zambia and African studies, I remain concerned and passionate about Haiti and the Caribbean.

I teach courses across these many interests and regions, and encourage my students to become creative, competent and professional social scientists, capable of working effectively in both academic and applied settings.

About Me

Ecological and economic anthropology, livelihoods, household, gender, kin networks and social organization, political economy and ecology, migration, aging, anthropological demography, GIS and remote sensing; sub-Saharan Africa, Zambia, Haiti, Caribbean.

Books

• 2007  Wilk, Richard and Lisa Cliggett
  Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology. Second Edition. Boulder, CO: Westview/Perseus Books.
• 2005  Cliggett, Lisa
  Grains from Grass: Aging, Gender and Famine in Rural Africa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

• In press  Cliggett, Lisa & Christopher Pool, eds.
  Economies and the Transformation of Landscape. Alta Mira Press.

• In press  Crooks, Deborah L., Lisa Cliggett, Steve Cole
  Child growth as a measure of livelihood security: The case of the Gwembe Tonga. American Journal of Human Biology.
• In press  Crooks, Deborah L., Lisa Cliggett; Rhonda Gillett-Netting
  Migration Following Resettlement of the Gwembe Tonga of Zambia: The Consequences for Children´s Growth. Journal of Food and Nutrition.
• 2007  Cliggett, Lisa, Elizabeth Colson, Rod Hay, Thayer Scudder, and Jon Unruh
  Chronic Uncertainty and Momentary Opportunity: A half century of adaptation among Zambia´s Gwembe Tonga. Special Issue, Eds. Jane Guyer and Eric Lambin. Human Ecology 35(1):19-31.
• 2007  Guyer, Jane, Eric Lambin, Lisa Cliggett, and Peter Walker (with contributions from all workshop participants)
  Temporal Heterogeneity in the Study of African Land Use. Special Issue, Eds. Jane Guyer and Eric Lambin. Human Ecology 35(1):3-17.
• 2005  Unruh, Jon, Lisa Cliggett, and Rod Hay
  Migration, Land Tenure, and Deforestation: Land Rights Reception and 'Clearing to Claim' in Southern Zambia. Natural Resources Forum 29:190-198.
• 2005  Cliggett, Lisa
  Remitting The Gift: Zambian mobility and anthropological insights for migration studies. Population Space and Place 11:35-48.
• 2003  Cliggett, Lisa
  Gift-remitting and Alliance Building in Zambian Modernity: Old Answers to Modern Problems. American Anthropologist 105(3):543-552.
• 2001  Cliggett, Lisa
  Gender, Subsistence, and Residential Arrangements for the Elderly in the Gwembe Valley, Zambia. Journal of Cross Cultural Gerontology 16(4):309-332.
• 2001  Cliggett, Lisa
  Carrying Capacity's New Guise: Folk Models in Anthropology and the Longitudinal Study of Environmental Change. Africa Today 48(1):3-20.
• 2000  Cliggett, Lisa
  Social Components of Migration: Experiences from Southern Province, Zambia. Human Organization 59(1):125-135.