Louise Lamphere

Who is Louise Lamphere?

Louise Lamphere is an American anthropologist who has been distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico since 2001. She was a faculty member at UNM from 1976-1979 and again from 1986-2009, when she became a Professor Emeritus.

Lamphere received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1968. She has published extensively throughout her career on subjects as diverse as the Navajo and their medicinal practices and de-industrialisation and urban anthropology; nonetheless she is possibly best known for her work on feminist anthropology and gender issues.

Lamphere was the co-editor, with Michele Zimbalist Rosaldo, of Woman, Culture, and Society, the first volume to address the anthropological study of gender and women's status. In the 1970s, after being denied tenure at Brown University, Lamphere brought a class action suit against Brown. She won an out-of-court settlement that served as a model for future suits by others.

In 2005 Lamphere supervised an ethnographic team which examined the impact of Medicaid managed care in New Mexico. The team published their articles in a special issue of Medical Anthropology Quarterly.