Robbie Ethridge
Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Phone Number:
Email: rethridg@olemiss.edu
http://socanth.olemiss.edu/2011/10/robbie-ethridge/

Key Words: historical anthropology, environmental anthropology, Indians of the Southern United States, Native Americans

Research Description: My primary area of interest is the ethnohistory of the Southern Indians. In particular, I am interested in the intersections between Native peoples and capitalist economics within the colonial context. In addition to several articles and chapters in books, I have co-edited three collections of essays (see below) and two monographs: a 2003 publication entitled Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World, which is a social, environmental, and economic history of the Creek Indians during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and a 2010 publication entitled From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715, which is a case study of the Chickasaws during the first 150 years of colonization set within a broad regional framework and the collapse of the pre-contact Mississippian world and the subsequent restructuring of Native life. I am currently engaged in researching more closely the contours of the collapse of the pre-contact Mississippian chiefdoms following the European invasion by working to reconstruct the late Mississippian world and then following each instance of collapse and restructuring across the American South.

Honors Theses:

Crowley, Elizabeth Cowden (2001) "Chritian Confusion: an Anthropological Analysis of the Christian Conversion Experience"