nicholas townsend Phone: (401) 863-9343
Office: Cabinet 301
email: Nicholas_Townsend@brown.eduTitle: Associate Professor, Anthropology
Background
Nicholas Townsend first came to Brown in 1994 as a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the PSTC. He was appointed to the faculty of the Department of Anthropology in 1996. He received his BA in Anthropology, MA in Demography, and PhD in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.
Research Interests
Social reproduction, families and social structure, men's lives in political-economic context, spatially dispersed social groups, the United States and Southern Africa.
At increasing levels of generality, my research is about: the relationships and roles of men in families in the United States and in Southern Africa; the social organization of domestic lives in a comparative perspective; and the cultural meanings and social organization relevant to social reproduction and cultural continuity. I have investigated the cultural meanings of fatherhood in three different groups: the contemporary American middle class (reported in my recent book The Package Deal); migrant men from Botswana, one of the labor reserves of apartheid South Africa; and a poor, rural population in South Africa. My teaching in the Anthropology Department's program in Anthropology and Population, and my affiliation with the Population Studies and Training Center reflect my dual conviction that anthropology can make theoretical and methodological contributions to population studies, and that studying population processes can illuminate fundamental anthropological issues.
Current research
Children's well-being and social connection in rural South Africa: funded by the National Science Foundation for 2001-2003, this project examines the form and content of distributed and dispersed parental relationships and the practical consequences for children's well-being. The point of the research is to see how social and material resources are transmitted through dispersed networks and how the structure of those networks affects the physical and social well-being of children. Fieldwork is in the context of a longitudinal demographic survey of 60,000 people conducted by the Agincourt Health and Population Programme of the University of the Witwatersrand in a rural area of South Africa's Limpopo Province. The field research concentrates on observation of social interactions and material transactions approached from the perspective of such functional domains as children's nutrition, health, and schooling. The objectives in this research are to present an accurate and context-specific picture of the demographically relevant groups and relationships in the society and to demonstrate that such a picture can be established in a way that nevertheless allows comparison between different social and cultural situations. I am joined in this research by Dr. Sangeetha Madhavan, who was a post-doctoral fellow in the Anthropology Department (1999-2001) and is currently at the University of the Witwatersrand. Barbara Andrews, a graduate student in the Anthropology Department, has participated in the fieldwork.
Selected Publications:
2002. The Package Deal: Marriage, Work, and Fatherhood in Men's Lives. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Click here for the publisher's overview of the book.
2002. "Children's residence patterns and educational attainment in rural South Africa." Population Studies 56(2):215-225 (with Sangeetha Madhavan, Stephen Tollman, Michel Garenne, and Kathleen Kahn).
2000. "Cultural contexts of father involvement." In Handbook of Father Involvement: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda and Natasha Cabrera. Pages 249-277. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.