Draft:Niko Besnier

Niko Besnier is a socio-cultural and linguistic anthropologist. His early fieldwork focused on Pacific Island societies, particularly Tonga and Tuvalu. Since then, he has become a reference scholar in the anthropology of sport, the body, and gender and sexuality. His research has also focused on a variety of other topics, including linguistic practices, politics in small-scale societies, emotions, social class, and globalization. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

Education

Niko Besnier was born in Algeria and was raised primarily in Spain. He obtained a BA in mathematics from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara in 1978, an MA in linguistics from Stanford University in 1981, and in 1986 a PhD in linguistics from the University of Southern California, where he was Elinor Ochs’ first graduate student.

Career

Niko Besnier has taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1986-88), Yale University (1989-95), Victoria University of Wellington (1996-2002), UCLA (2002-05), and the University of Amsterdam (2005-22). He has held visiting appointments at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, University of Auckland, Kagoshima University, Waseda University (twice), University of Melbourne, École normal supérieure Paris, Université de Toulouse III Paul Sabatier, University of Manchester, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Universidad de la República in Montevideo, and Charles University in Prague.

In 2015-19, Niko Besnier was editor-in-chief of the journal American Ethnologist. During his editorship, the journal experienced a significant increase in its ranking.

Scholarship

Niko Besnier’s early research was based on long-term fieldwork on Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu, and concerned language in its social context. For example, his book, Literacy, Emotion, and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll, analyzed the grassroot literacy practices of the inhabitants of the atoll and was in dialogue with the rethinking of literacy as a social practice, rather than as a deterministic force, that was taking place in the 1980s and 1990s. Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics analyzes gossiping on Nukulaelae as a mechanism that is both politically levelling and attention seeking, enabling people to control each other’s reputations, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Both books demonstrate that, while Nukulaelae is a relatively isolated atoll, it is embedded in global forces that shape people’s communicative activities and lives. In 2000, he also published a detailed analytic grammar of the Tuvaluan language based on a extensive corpus of naturalistic texts he had gathered over the years.

Since 1994, he has been conducting fieldwork with transgender people in Tonga, locally referred to as leitī, which is still ongoing. He has analyzed the complex position that this small minority occupies in the society, in which they are at once admired and marginalized. On the occasion of the beauty pageants they organize, such as the annual Miss Galaxy pageant, the entire society comes to admire their inventiveness and creativity. At the same time, they are marginalized by the structuring of society in terms of marriage and descent. However, their social position is rapidly changing as Tonga interacts with global forces, primarily through their diasporic communities in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States.

In 2012-17, Niko Besnier directed a project titled “Globalization, Sports, and the Precarity of Masculinity,” funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. The project focused on how the neoliberal transformation of the sports industries in the Global North have encouraged young men in many countries of the Global South to seek a career in world sport as a solution to poverty and the concomitant crisis of masculinity, despite the fact that very few managed to turn their dreams into reality. The project brought together questions of gender, global inequalities, and the body by analyzing how large-scale structures affect ordinary people’s everyday experiences.

He is currently developing a new interest in wellness and its different manifestations around the world. In many societies, the uncertainties that the turn to neoliberalism has created and that the Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated have led ordinary people to pursue new projects of remaining healthy. While these projects are commonly understood as personal, they are in fact deeply enmeshed in politics, whether overtly or covertly. They pose questions about the ownership of “traditional” wellness practices, the appropriation of these practices by the corporate world, and what has become of the body in uncertain times.

Selected Publications

Balzani, Marzia, and Niko Besnier. 2022. Social and Cultural Anthropology for the 21st Century: Connected Worlds. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. 2022.

Besnier, Niko, Domenica Gisela Calabrò, and Daniel Guinness, eds. 2021. Sport, Migration, and Gender in the Neoliberal Age. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Besnier, Niko, Susan Brownell, and Thomas F. Carter. 2018. The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics. Oakland: University of California Press. Translated into Spanish, French, and Japanese.

Besnier, Niko, and Kalissa Alexeyeff, eds. 2014. Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Besnier, Niko. 2011. On the Edge of the Global: Modern Anxieties in a Pacific Island Nation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Besnier, Niko. 2009. Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Besnier, Niko. 2000. Tuvaluan: A Polynesian Language of the Central Pacific. London: Routledge.

Besnier, Niko. 1995. Literacy, Emotion, and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.