Lee D. Baker

Baker's Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture was published in 2010 by Duke University Press. In his introduction to the book, Baker writes: "My hope is that these stories will help to delimit the limits, understand the contradictions, and offer a better understanding of the terms and conditions of race and culture which are employed within explicitly political projects that get woven into the fabric of North American culture and become part of American history."

Lee D. Baker is an American cultural anthropologist, author, and Duke University faculty member. He is the Mrs. A. Hehmeyer Professor of Cultural Anthropology, African & African-American Studies, and Sociology. He served as Duke's Dean of Academic Affairs and Associate Vice Provost from 2008 to 2016. He taught at Columbia University from 1997 to 2000. Baker has authored two books and more than sixty academic articles, reviews, and chapters related to cultural anthropology, among other fields.

Baker's writings have appeared in various scholarly publications, including The Atlanta Journal, Teaching Anthropology, Transforming Anthropology, Voice of Black Studies, The Chronicle of Higher Education, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Anthropology News, and The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. He wrote the entry on Franz Boas in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2008).

Throughout his career, Baker has received a long list of grants and fellowships, including the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University, a pre-doctoral fellowship at The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research from Harvard University, and, most recently, a grant to support the Mellon/Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program from the Mellon Foundation. Baker has had scores of publications, including three books (two as an author and one as an editor), numerous articles, book chapters, and over 50 invited lectures. He has been the recipient of awards such as the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Award for Teaching Excellence (2007) from Duke University and the Benjamin N. Duke Fellow (2003) from the [National Humanities Center]. Baker has been on twenty-five committees, councils, and panels. From 1999 to 2003, Baker was an appointed member of the [American Anthropological Association] (AAA) Centennial Commission and, from 2005 to 2007, he was appointed the AAA Commission on Governance. Baker became the chair of the Allocations Committee of the AAA Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing. In 2013, Baker was awarded the Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America by the Society for the Anthropology of North America.

In addition, Baker has written for news publications such as the New York Times and Raleigh News and Observer. In July 2006, Baker published an op-ed in The Herald-Sun about a hate crime in Middlesex, North Carolina, in which a cross was burned in a black family's yard.

After receiving his PhD, Baker became an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University between the years of 1995 and 1997. He then went on to teach at Columbia University as an assistant professor of anthropology and African-American studies from 1997 to 1999, becoming an associate professor at Columbia from 1999 to 2000. For the next ten years, from 2000 to 2010, Baker was an associate professor of cultural anthropology, sociology, and African & African-American studies at Duke University. In 2008, Baker became the Dean of Academic Affairs of Duke's Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, about which he said, "I look forward to building on the successes of the past to create new opportunities for the future." In 2010, he became a professor of cultural anthropology and African and African-American studies as well as the Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.

Baker has written a number of scholarly articles and essays about this critique and other information concerning Boas, including, but not limited to: "The Location of Franz Boas Within the African American Struggle" (1994), "Unraveling the Boasian Discourse: The Racial Politics of 'Culture' in School Desegregation" (1998), "Franz Boas Out of the Ivory Tower" (2004), and "Franz Boas and his 'Conspiracy' to Destroy the White Race" (2010). In a July 2000 interview on PBS, Baker discussed Boas's work in the U.S. and the way in which his work was used by W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP.

Baker attended Portland State University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology and a certificate in Black Studies in 1989. He went on to Temple University in Philadelphia to pursue graduate research. In Philadelphia, Baker found himself within a different community than he was used to in Portland. "It was good," he recalls, "to be around a lot of really hardworking, smart, attractive people who wanted to make a difference. I was not a minority, in a sense; I was just among a lot of different people trying the same thing." At Temple, his doctoral advisor was Thomas C. Patterson, who supported Baker's focus on the history of anthropology. Baker completed his thesis, Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954, in 1994.

Baker's book From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 was published by the University of California Press in 1998 and was widely reviewed. The publisher's description of the book reads, in part:

The narratives that unfold in the book include stories about specific anthropologists and sociocultural phenomena such as the Harlem Renaissance Movement, and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Baker's book explores the intricate connections shared among these people and events, and the impacts they have made on shaping American ideas of race and culture. He addresses the different ways in which individuals such as Franz Boas, Frederic W. Putnam, Alice M. Bacon, and Daniel G. Brinton have either accepted or spurned anthropological notions of race and culture. It is important to point out that Baker's work in Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture was not exclusive to analysis of African and African-American culture. The book has a strong emphasis on the history of racial inequality concerning Native American culture as well.