Alma Gottlieb

Alma Gottlieb is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Visiting Scholar in Anthropology at Brown University. She conducted long-term fieldwork in Beng communities in Ivory Coast (1979-93) and now connects with young Beng people through social media. A full-length ethnography of Beng childrearing practices appeared as The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa (2004); she has also...See more

Alma Gottlieb is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Visiting Scholar in Anthropology at Brown University. She conducted long-term fieldwork in Beng communities in Ivory Coast (1979-93) and now connects with young Beng people through social media. A full-length ethnography of Beng childrearing practices appeared as The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa (2004); she has also written the Beng-English Dictionary (with M. Lynne Murphy, 1995) and Under the Kapok Tree: Identity and Difference in Beng Thought (1992). With proceeds from two memoirs of their lives with the Beng - Parallel Worlds (1993) and Braided Worlds (2012) - Gottlieb and fiction writer Philip Graham co-founded the Beng Community Fund, a non-governmental organization that funds development projects in Beng villages. See less