Robert R. Desjarlais

Robert R. Desjarlais is an anthropologist and writer from Massachusetts, United States. He currently lives in New York State, and tries to travel and live in Europe when he is able to. He has taught anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College since 1994. He received his PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1990, and was a NIMH post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard University from 1990 to 1992. In 2020-21 he has been a research fellow at the Paris Institute of Advanced Studies.

Robert has conducted anthropological research in several distinct settings, ranging from the Nepal Himalayas to Queens, New York, and from chess clubs in Manhattan to a shelter for the homeless in downtown Boston. He has conducted extensive research in Nepal among Hyolmo people, an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people, beginning in the late 1980s.

Robert is presently interested in the dynamics of bodies, perception, violence, memory and the politics of life and death, and traces and erasures, in Europe and North Africa. In the past few years he has been engaged in several research projects based in Paris, France. What happens when violence wreaks havoc in a particular place? What kinds of traces remain in the wake of violence? What sorts of processes and politics of consciousness, inscription, effacement, image-making, time, archiving, and memorialization emerge in such situations?

These are some of the questions he gives thought to in considering dynamics of violence, mourning, wounding, and memory related to recent acts of collective violence in France. A second project is more historical in nature: here he examines the politically charged circumstances of life, death, wounding, burial, and mourning in situations of state violence against Algerians in France and Algeria in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the Algerian war of independence.