Categories are alive: interview with Brackette F. Williams

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Brackette F. Williams is an American anthropologist and a Senior Justice ­Advocate, currently an associate professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of ­Arizona. She studied at the University of Cornell, the University of Arizona, and received her doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Her work interweaves ­matters of race, gender, class, ideology and politics in a unique manner – as seen in the article “A class act: Anthropology and the race to nation across ethnic terrain” (Annual Review of Anthropology, 18, 1989), the innovative monograph Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle (Duke University Press, 1991), and the edited volume Women Out of Place: The Gender of Agency and the Race of Nationality (Routledge, 1996). She is also the recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award, aimed at helping “creative people to improve the human condition”.Over the last years, Brackette Williams approached multi-racial communities with an original interpretation of the theory of social conflict. Her forthcoming book Classifying to Kill: An Ethnography of the Death Penalty System in the United States, based on ethnographic work, addresses the death penalty schemes as a classification process for making concepts and categories designed to objectify the dynamics surrounding the death penalty. Williams examines how the ways to kill, present in the contexts and debates of death penalty, influence and display social ideas about revenge, retribution and punishment. She argues that those categories “fight with each other” all the time in order to define justice in America, a country in which ideas and practices about race, class and gender present in informal practices join those in the formal legal system.Brackette Williams shares with us some biographical memories, finding in the past the ground for her alternative and provocative view for Anthropology: “I never thought of our life as good or bad. It was just something we did”, she said of her migrant worker family. “But I was very much aware of how certain ethnic groups were treated; how some were punished for speaking Spanish, how some flowed in and out, while others never could. And I was very much aware of power, the power the white managers and landowners could hold over others. I don’t think it is at all necessary to have lived that kind of life to become a good anthropologist, but I do know that I have been conscious of those issues all my life” (, November 2011.