Anthropologist as Court Jester: Civil disobedience and the People’s Café

This autobiopic piece chronicles Scheper-Hughes’s early voluntary service with the Peace Corp in Brazil, followed by her early academic career and coming to Berkeley, and then her ongoing engagement and activism in standing up for, and standing with, others. This welled up into community activism and advocacy for the homeless together with Berkeley Catholic Workers, eventually resulting in a cafe inside of Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1989, providing rationale for Scheper-Hughes’s own well-known applied anthropology and activism, which has made her famous as one of today’s leading anthropologists.