Katherine Lambert-Pennington
Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Anthropology
Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1970s and 1980s sensitized Katherine Lambert-Pennington, a third-year doctoral student in Cultural Anthropology, to issues of race and inequality, and sparked her interest in different cultures. She took these interests, and a love for writing, to Miami University’s Interdisciplinary Studies program, where she was introduced to anthropology, and ultimately concentrated in Cultural Anthropology and 20th Century African-American Studies. She pursued her interests at University of Tennessee, where she earned a Master’s degree in anthropology.
While working on her master’s, Katherine went to South Africa to study the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She explored “what it means to publicly ‘tell the truth’ and how these new “truths” reveal the complex experiences of apartheid forgiveness and history making.”
For her master’s thesis, Katherine wanted to research contemporary aboriginal communities in Australia in an urban setting. After much poking around, she located the Koori community in La Perouse (LaPa). “LaPa is interesting because it has always been identified and imagined as an aboriginal community space that was once a mission/reserve, but since the post-War expansion of Sydney in the 1950s, the Koori community of LaPa resides inside a wealthy, non-indigenous suburb.” One of her main interests was—and is—“that the people have such a strong sense of themselves as aboriginal, and have strong ties to their community in spite of the fact that they have been at the forefront of European-Aboriginal contact for more than two centuries, and have lived through all of the government’s policies and injustices toward aboriginal people, in much the same way that American Indians and African Americans have in the United States.” The LaPa community continues to interest Katherine, who will be returning for a year to collect information for her dissertation, tentatively titled “Being in Australia, Belonging to the Land: Koori Identity at La Perouse.” Katherine wants her work to challenge what she sees as a false dichotomy: that an ethnic group and their culture is either authentic or assimilated.
When she was doing research in Australia for her thesis, Katherine was concerned with being respectful, non-hierarchical, and ethical in her work with the members of the LaPa community. She thinks of field work as a reciprocal process of learning between the researcher and her subjects. Katherine kept her interviews open-ended, flowing with the shape of the conversation, rather than trying to shape it herself. She was also cognizant of the fact that being white has a certain privilege attached to it, and didn’t want this to shape people’s answers. Katherine then typed up her interviews and showed the transcripts to the interviewees, allowing them to elaborate, delete, or otherwise make changes to the text. Some people weren’t interested, but others gave her more information on what they said, enriching her understanding. Katherine thinks it’s important to give people say in how they are portrayed, which was a foreign idea in anthropology just ten years ago. She brought this non-traditional attitude to the process of writing her thesis as well, by using the narratives in their entirety, allowing readers to come to their own conclusions.
When Katherine looked into Duke for graduate school, everything fell into place. Even though none of the professors claimed Australia as their primary interest, she felt good about the faculty and the program. Her advisor, Lee Baker, does some work with Australia. Also, Duke could offer the native southerner something the other schools she considered could not: good weather. Miami University, in Ohio, had given her sufficient experience of northern winters to know she did not want to remain in that part of the country. Once she arrived at Duke, Katherine was pleased to find faculty who are “supportive, interesting, helpful, flexible, and available,” as well as a department without the competitive atmosphere sometimes found in programs where not everyone is funded. Katherine says that this atmosphere is really important to her, because “education is about sharing; it’s not about ownership. Education is the process of disseminating information and exchanging communication. It’s a very productive environment for me.”
Katherine thinks the diverse and experienced faculty at Duke are its most outstanding feature, because there are “really great people, some lesser-known, some stars, that are really actively thinking and working and teaching classes, and are not here as pretty figureheads who are these great scholars but do not teach anything. And that’s rare. You do not get that at state schools, for certain reasons, and you do not get that at the Harvards of the world for a whole other set of reasons — the stars are too busy being great and doing what they do. I think that we’re lucky.” Although she’s worked with many excellent teachers, the four who really stand out in her mind are Lee Baker, Karla Holloway, Naomi Quinn, and Charles Payne. Katherine’s only real complaint is that graduate students do not have enough time to take classes with all of the professors they admire.
When Katherine is not studying for her prelims, getting ready to spend the next academic year in Australia, or doing research for her dissertation, she likes to play with her border collies, Mazzy and Jake, who herd Frisbees in lieu of sheep. Another favorite pastime is reading cookbooks and cooking. “Most people are interested in the ingredients that go into a recipe, but I really like knowing about the actual preparation. I like learning how to make new kinds of food, like Thai or Indian, and experimenting with different kinds of foods.” She also facilitates grant writing workshops for non-profit affiliates of United Way of North Carolina. Katherine says she prefers grants training to grant writing because she is able to help out such a wide variety of organizations all over the state. The most important part of her non-academic life, however, is the time she spends with her husband; they both have busy schedules, but make the time to keep their lives in balance. Katherine never entirely stops being an anthropologist, though, because she sees “everything as an ethnographic possibility.”
Lee Baker
Associate Professor, Cultural Anthropology
Katherine is an amazing student who maintains a razor sharp focus on her research project while she reads broadly and theorizes boldly. What impresses me the most about Katherine is her ability to assemble an eclectic analytical toolbox from seemingly disparate theories, historical periods, and geographical regions to construct a powerful critique of Australian race relations and a riveting examination of Aboriginal identity formation.
(This profile originally appeared in the Spring 2001 issue of The GRIND.)