James Ferguson, anthropologist devoted to studying international aid, has died

James “Jim” Ferguson, the Susan S. and William H. Hindle Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, whose research explored development and modernity in the lives of southern Africans, died Feb. 12. He was 65.

Photo courtesy of Department of Anthropology

Best known for his work on the politics and anthropology of international development, Ferguson was the author of six books, including his best-known, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge University Press, 1990), and gave the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture, considered the most prestigious lecture in cultural anthropology, in 2009. He also chaired the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology from 2005 to 2007 and later chaired the Department of Anthropology from 2007 to 2013 and from 2016 to 2017. In the latter role, he led a newly formed department, created through the merging of the existing departments of anthropological sciences and cultural and social anthropology. 

“Jim Ferguson was the best colleague one could ask for,” said Sylvia Yanagisako, the Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies, Emerita, in H&S.

Powerful ideas, humble presence

By the time Ferguson arrived at Stanford in 2003 (after a yearlong fellowship with Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 2000), he had already established his reputation as a leading scholar on a broad range of theoretical and ethnographic issues, with a focus on Lesotho, Zambia, South Africa, and Namibia. On campus, he expanded on his work, publishing scores of articles and reviews for journals around the world and earning a fellowship with the Stanford Humanities Center. Ferguson’s research was noted for its seriousness; he was unafraid of tackling such topics as poverty and genocide. 

At Stanford, he also wrote a number of books, including Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Duke University Press, 2006) and Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution (Duke University Press, 2015), adapted from the Morgan lecture. Each addressed the complex issues of development and wealth in southern Africa. In 2017, he became the Susan Ford Dorsey Director of the Center for African Studies, a position he held for three years. And in 2020, Ferguson was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Having once chaired one of Stanford’s two departments related to anthropology, he was a natural choice to lead the reintegration of those departments in 2007. In the role of chair, he provided thoughtful leadership yet also made time for students.  “Not only was he a leader in his field, but he was a wise and even-handed chair who adeptly steered the Department of Anthropology during the period of reintegration of the two departments into which it had been split,” Yanagisako said.

“As a young graduate student, I remember having jitters meeting Jim Ferguson, who was for me one of the biggest and most important names in the discipline,” said one of those students, Kerem Can Uşşakli, now junior research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. “Sitting in one of his famous 15-minute office hour sessions, I was pleasantly taken aback by how humble, good spirited, and approachable he was. His words would strike you as perfectly reasonable and common sense, but upon reflection, you would realize how socially transformative they were. This was, in essence, Jim's magic: Ideas could be playful and powerful, full of lightness and force.”

Deeply serious, delightfully ironic

Born in 1959, Ferguson devoted his career to understanding the complex politics of international development. He earned a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1979, followed by his master’s and doctoral degrees in social anthropology from Harvard in 1981 and 1985. 

From 1985 to 2003, he was a faculty member in the department of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, including four years as chair. He published dozens of articles and four books during those years and devoted himself to learning the languages of those he studied: Sesotho, French, Lozi, Bemba, and Finnish. As the world of international aid evolved, his studies evolved with it, and his later years were devoted to work that advocated for direct payments to the impoverished. Throughout his career, he approached his work with rigor while maintaining a sense of wonder and delight at the world around him.

“Jim was a deeply serious intellectual, but he always maintained a delightful ironic distance to himself, to the many quirks of academic culture and the discipline of anthropology that he cared so deeply about,” said Thomas Blom Hansen, the Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor and professor of anthropology in H&S. “There is little wonder that he became a model for so many students, a model for how to conduct oneself with dignity and humility, how to write with clarity and without jargon, how to think deeply and critically.”

Ferguson is survived by his partner, Liisa Malkki, a recently retired Stanford anthropology professor.