Jenny Huberman is a cultural anthropologist with wide-ranging research interests. Her first ethnography, Ambivalent Encounters: Childhood, Tourism and Social Change in Banaras, India (Rutgers University Press 2012), explored interactions between Western tourists and children working in the informal tourist economy in the city of Banaras, India. Her second book, Transhumanism: From Ancestors to Avatars (Cambridge University Press 2020), examines the values and visions animating the Transhumanist Movement in the United States. It shows how transhumanist attempts to use science and technology to usher in an enhanced post-human species speak to long-standing concerns within the discipline of cultural anthropology. Jenny’s third book, The Spirit of Digital Capitalism (Polity Press Forthcoming 2022), explores the ideological transformations that have accompanied the rise of digital capitalism, and it asks, how are digital technologies making new forms of capital accumulation and domination possible? Jenny has also published numerous chapters and articles on death in the digital age, and in the future, she plans to explore how and why boredom has emerged as a central dis-ease of contemporary society. She likes to remind her students that the one of the great things about studying anthropology is that "the grist" for "the anthropological mill" is only as limited as their imaginations.
Courses
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
The Consumer Society
The Social Life of Things
The Living Dead
Writing Culture: The Craft of Ethnography
Culture, Emotion, Identity
Worlds of Work
Academic Credentials
Ph.D., Sociocultural Anthropology, University of Chicago, 2006
M.A., Sociocultural Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1999
B.A., Anthropology, Boston University, 1994