Dr. Erin B Taylor

Dr. Erin B. Taylor is an anthropologist with a background in fine art. She defected to anthropology when she realised that she was far better at deploying a pen for writing than for drawing. She is currently living in Lisbon, Portugal, where she has a full-time research position at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS).

Erin is the editor of Fieldwork Identities in the Caribbean, a book that explores what it’s really like to do fieldwork in faraway places. Answers to this question are as diverse as the researchers and the field sites they choose. Each chapter describes how the author negotiated aspects of identity in the field, including race, nationality, class, gender, religion, and sexuality. The authors are all early-career researchers who have conducted fieldwork in different Caribbean nations, including the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Belize.

Erin received her PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Sydney, Australia, in June 2009. She conducted her fieldwork in a squatter settlement in Santo Domingo, writing her thesis on the relationship between poverty and residents’ use of material things, including the houses and communities in which they live.

Since then, Erin been working on two concurrent projects. Her research at the ICS examines relations between people living on the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. She is interested in how residents of either side of the border view each other as similar to or different from each other, and the effects of history, culture and economy on their perspectives.

Erin’s other project is a collaborative investigation of mobile phones and money practices in Haiti. The project, called ‘Mobiles, Migrants and Money: A Study of Mobility in Haiti and the Dominican Republic is funded by the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at the University of California, Irvine. Some objects from the research are currently on display in the Citi Money Gallery in the British Museum.

Apart from being an editor and author for PopAnth, Erin blogs regularly on her website.

Erin has contributed to the following tomes:

Fieldwork Identities in the Caribbean

Local Lives (Studies in Migration and Diaspora)

Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage

Encyclopedia of Global Studies