James Ferguson is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. His research has been conducted in Lesotho and Zambia, and has engaged a broad range of theoretical and ethnographic issues. A central theme running through it has been a concern with the political, broadly conceived, and with the relation between specific social and cultural processes and the abstract narratives of “development” and “modernization” through which such processes have so often been known and understood. His books include Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (University of California Press, 1999) and The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge University Press, 1990). A book of Ferguson's essays on issues of globalization and governmentality in contemporary Africa (Global Shadows: Essays on Africa in the Neoliberal World Order) will be published by Duke University Press in early 2006. He is currently working on a new research project in South Africa, exploring the emergence of new problematics of poverty and social policy under conditions of neoliberalism.