Postdoctoral Fellows

Pete Richardson

Pete Richardson received his Ph.D. from Emory University in the fall of 2002. Pete has worked on a corn farm, as a bouncer, in the Aleutians as a fisherman, in an Idaho sawmill, and as an ethnographer... His recent work has centered upon labor with nature and timber workers in the Intermountain West. He is currently spending time with unionized auto workers, discussing changes in the industry. Pete's interests include the fields of Psychological, Philosophical, and Social Anthropology, The Anthropologies of Work and Nature, and Western and Labor Histories.

He is in the process of completing a book manuscript: an ethnography exploring how, in an Idaho sawmill, labor and forest are bound together through institutions and ethics, exchange and ritual. At CEEL, he has focused on the question of what constitutes the middle class, what are the middle class' boundaries, and how does middle class-ness relate to a typology of labor? The middle class is known as much as by what it is not as any positive features. In his fieldwork with auto workers, he is pursuing the question of how auto workers, solidly middle class (through union wages) just two decades ago, respond to an age of diminishing prospects for industrial workers and their families.