DR. MICHELE GAMBURD
Michele Ruth Gamburd (Ph.D., University of Michigan 1995) is Professor of Anthropology. A cultural anthropologist, she focuses on issues of power, politics, and identity in a Sinhala-speaking village in southwestern Sri Lanka. She writes about gender, family relations, and power struggles in The Kitchen Spoon’s Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s Migrant Housemaids (2000) and Breaking the Ashes: The Culture of Illicit Liquor in Sri Lanka (2008). She explores humanitarian aid, class hierarchies, and disaster diplomacy in The Golden Wave: Culture and Politics after Sri Lanka’s Tsunami Disaster (2013) and in a volume (co-edited with Dennis B. McGilvray) entitled Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions (2010). Her most recent book, Linked Lives: Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka (2021), addresses issues of aging, demographic transformation, and changing intergenerational obligations in rural families.