Mark A. Moberg, Ph.D.

Research Interests

• Caribbean and Central America
• Globalization
• Rural Development
• Alternative Trade

Biography

Dr. Mark Moberg is a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology,and Social Work at the University of South Alabama. He holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Iowa, and an M.A. and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Broadly trained as an economic anthropologist, Dr. Moberg has focused on issues of agrarian change, globalization, and political economy in Central America and the Caribbean. He has conducted field research in Nicaragua, Belize, St. Lucia and Dominica, as well as the US Gulf Coast. Dr. Moberg’s most recent work centers on the impact of market deregulation and privatization on small-scale banana producers in the Caribbean. This research examines Fair Trade certification as a form of neoliberal governance, emphasizing how alternative markets are experienced “on the ground” by their intended beneficiaries. His work has appeared in leading anthropology and regional studies journals, including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Human Organization, Ethnology, and Dialectical Anthropology, among others. In addition, Dr. Moberg is the author or co-editor of six books, including Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003), Slipping Away: Banana Politics and Fair Trade in the Eastern Caribbean (Berghahn, 2008), Fair Trade and Social Justice (NYU Press, 2010), and Engaging Anthropological Theory: A Social and Political History (Routledge, 2013).

His scholarship has been supported in part with peer-reviewed grants from the National Science Foundation (Cultural Anthropology), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the National Endowment for Humanities. In addition to frequently reviewing for journals in anthropology, Latin American studies, and geography, Dr. Moberg has served on review panels for the National Science Foundation, Puerto Rico Sea Grant, and the Fulbright-Hays Foundation. He is a past president of the Southern Anthropological Society, and has served on the Executive Board of the Society for Applied

Selected Publications

• Moberg, Mark. 2014 “Certification and Neoliberal Governance: Moral Economies of Fair Trade in the Eastern Caribbean.” American Anthropologist. 116 (1): 1-16.

• Moberg, Mark. 2013 Engaging Anthropological Theory: A Social and Political History. London: Routledge.

• Lyon, Sarah and Mark Moberg, eds. 2010 Fair Trade and Social Justice: Global Ethnographies. New York: New York University Press.

• Moberg, Mark 2009 “Determinism, Agency and Justice:” in “Richard Manning and Against the Grain: The Environmental Writer Meets the Anthropologists.” Culture and Agriculture. 31 (1): 8-12.

• Moberg, Mark. 2008 Slipping Away: Banana Politics and Fair Trade in the Eastern Caribbean. New York: Berghahn Books. (reprinted 2010)

• Moberg, Mark 2005 “Fair Trade and Eastern Caribbean Banana Farmers: Rhetoric and Reality in the Anti- Globalization Movement.” Human Organization . 64 (1): 4-15

• Moberg, Mark and Tawnya Sesi Moberg 2005 “The United Houma Nation in the U. S. Congress: Corporations, Communities, and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment.”Urban Anthropology 34 (1): 85-124.

• Striffler, Steve and Mark Moberg, eds. 2003 Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.

• Moberg, Mark 2002 "Erin Brockovich Doesn't Live Here: Environmental Politics and Responsible Care in Mobile County, Alabama." Human Organization 61 (4): 377-389.

• Moberg, Mark 2001 "Co-opting Justice: Transformation of a Multi-Racial Environmental Coalition in Southern Alabama." Human Organization 60 (2): 166-177.