About

Richard Handler is a cultural anthropologist specializing in the study of modern western societies. His initial fieldwork was conducted in Quebec from 1976 to 1984, where he studied the Québécois nationalist movement, leading to an enduring interest in nationalism, ethnicity, and the politics of culture. Since joining the University of Virginia in 1986, Handler has explored topics such as history museums, corporate culture, class, race, and gender through ethnographic studies, including work on Colonial Williamsburg in collaboration with Eric Gable and Anna Lawson. His research also examines the intersection of anthropology and literature, analyzing works by Jane Austen and the literary influences of anthropologists like Ruth Benedict and Edward Sapir, as well as the challenges of writing ethnographies of nationalist movements. Additionally, Handler has a keen interest in the history of American anthropology, particularly in how anthropologists critique modernity and how their critical discourse relates to broader intellectual trends. His recent work focuses on U.S. postal iconography in relation to national identity, citizenship, and consumerism.

Research topics

• History
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Art
• Geography
• Political Science
• Genealogy
• Environmental ethics
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Religious studies
• Law

Selected publications

• Expression games in Jane Austen and Erving Goffman: “Family and connections” versus “solitary cultish men”

  Anthropology & Humanism · 2025-04-23

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This paper brings together two brilliant analysts of social encounters, Jane Austen and Erving Goffman. It proceeds by applying some of Goffman's terms for face‐to‐face interactions to several scenes from Austen's novels in which characters try to extract information from others while preventing others from extracting information from them. In their treatment of these “expression games,” both authors display a similar sociological sensibility. They differ, however, in their treatment of the individual in relation to society; for Austen, an individual can never be viewed apart from family and connections, while for Goffman, the individual is in and of itself a sacred social entity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Peer support groups as a participatory development principle

  Development in Practice · 2025-04-24

  article

  This paper reimagines peer support groups by centring a community’s worldviews. We engage with Iliso Lamakhosikazi, a women’s peer support group in South Africa, through an eight-week qualitative study embedded within nearly a decade of collaborative research. This study, using participatory observations, interviews, and focus groups, reveals how Iliso Lamakhosikazi reimagines peer support groups in terms of sociality, focus, and operational structure. The findings show that embedding development efforts within community worldviews can emphasise collective well-being, enhance relationality, and support broader health and wellness goals. Future efforts should apply empowered participation to reimagine other participatory development principles, such as community gardens and mutual aid groups, grounded in a community’s ways of knowing.

  PublisherDOI

• Humanity Ground Zero: The Erasure of Labor from United States Postal Iconography

  Journal of Anthropological Research · 2024-07-10

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Postage stamps are sites of nationalist imagery, produced continuously by the US government since 1847. Over time, a limited group of people deemed worthy of representing the nation on stamps—white male politicians and military heroes—was diversified to include different kinds of persons: women, Native Americans, African Americans, and people in the arts, sciences, athletics, and entertainment. This paper focuses on a singular exception to this iconographic diversification: workers, people who labor. Stamps that seem to be about labor (those devoted to such topics as labor leaders, collective bargaining, and employment for the disabled) are, we claim, about something other than “labor as such.” Drawing on Marx’s Grundrisse, we argue that in capitalist societies, waged labor and pauperism are indissolubly linked because laborers have no control over the reliability of their employment. Laborers are “humanity ground zero,” people deemed (in capitalist common sense) to have accomplished nothing beyond working for a wage and who therefore cannot be represented in postal iconography as builders of the nation.

  PublisherDOI

• Why separating fact from fiction is critical in teaching US slavery

  2023-09-26

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The American Stamp

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2023 · 3 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Genealogy
  • History

  Examining the canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American stamps, Laura Goldblatt and Richard Handler show how postal iconography and material culture offer a window into the contested meanings and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship.

  PublisherDOI

• The Eagle, the Rocket, and the Moon: U.S. Postal Iconography at the End of History

  Modern American History · 2023-09-22 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In this Photoarticle, we survey what we will call the post-historical U.S. postage stamps of the last third of the twentieth century. We focus on stamps depicting the space race and space travel, as well as the linkage of some of those stamps to the 1992 Olympic games, to analyze the iconographic and narrative consequences of an increasing turn toward the commercialization of postal services. The stamps we consider coincide with a series of new commercial strategies on the part of the United States Postal Service (USPS) and a broad resurgence in public interest in space travel. While many critics during the 1960s considered the space race to be a distraction from more pressing political concerns—such as urban poverty or the war in Vietnam—by the 1980s and 1990s, space travel had become a less controversial endeavor (perhaps due to its large-scale defunding), and astronauts, especially the Apollo 11 astronauts, were widely lauded as heroes. We have chosen this “topical” focus (as stamp collectors say) for two reasons. First, the iconography of space exploration is dominated by one specific moment, when the lunar module Eagle touched down on the moon on July 20, 1969. Despite an ongoing history of space exploration before and after 1969, the moon landing, we will argue, was treated in postal iconography as a timeless event —a climactic technological triumph that seemed to announce what Francis Fukuyama, in an influential essay, called “the end of history.”

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• :<i>The Magnificent Boat: The Colonial Theft of a South Seas Cultural Treasure</i>

  Journal of Anthropological Research · 2023-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Why no living people appear on US postage stamps

  2023-06-21

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sounding, Historically, Anthropology’s Current Crisis

  Anthropological Quarterly · 2022-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Sounding, Historically, Anthropology’s Current Crisis Richard Handler A. Elisabeth Reichel. Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 430 pp. A. Elisabeth Reichel’s meticulously researched and relentlessly argued study is one among several publications resulting from a collaborative project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and focused on “cultural, poetic, and medial alterity” in the work of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead.1 Like the larger project, Reichel’s book analyzes how these anthropologists described and conceptualized cultural alterity in alternative genres (poetry, film, ethnography), in the process often commenting in one medium (written language) on other media (music, film). Reichel asks how generic and medial alterity reflected or even contributed to the anthropologists’ models of cultural alterity. Her answers lead to her most important argument concerning the degree to which Boasian anthropology continued to rely on some central assumptions of the socio-evolutionary theory it challenged. Reichel frames her analysis with essays by George Stocking on “the dark-skinned savage” (1968) and “the dualism of the anthropological tradition” (1989), Michel-Rolph Trouillot on “the savage slot” (1991), as well as Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983). In Stocking’s account, both romanticism-primitivism and Enlightenment progressivism haunted Boasian anthropology. At times, Boasian anthropologists romanticized [End Page 185] so-called primitive peoples as “genuine cultures” (Sapir 1924) that presented a healthy contrast to what they saw as the ills of modernity. At other times, they celebrated modern rationality and science even as they mourned what they saw as the inevitable disappearance of their discipline’s object. How, Reichel prompts us to ask, could the anthropology of any school or period escape these tensions, dependent as it has been on Trouillot’s savage slot (encompassing the dual image of the savage as noble and ignoble) and Fabian’s allochronism (the placement of the primitive in a time antecedent to the present) to establish the reality of the phenomenal object that warranted its existence? Also central to Reichel’s analysis is work in sound studies and intermedial studies, areas of research more developed in Europe and Canada than in the United States. Reichel notes that mid-20th century forerunners of contemporary sound studies—who sought to reassert orality’s value in the face of the dominance of the visual in modern culture—were nonetheless ensnared by the kind of noble/ignoble dichotomy that has marked anthropology’s conceptualization of the primitive. They entertained, in her terms, both “sonophilic” and “sonophobic” approaches to sound (35). Sonophilic theorists praised the immediacy of sound and the way it immerses hearers in direct experience in contrast to their contention that sight, especially in “literate” cultures, distances people from that experience. Sonophobic theorists reversed the polarity, imagining people in oral cultures imprisoned in (and sometimes terrified by) sensory immediacy in contrast to the detached, rational observers of visual cultures. Subsequent work in sound studies has tried to transcend that dichotomy by paying attention to the cultural construction and evaluation of acoustic phenomena across time and space without treating any particular relationship of sound to other sensory modes as given in nature or predictable in terms of any purported developmental laws.2 The sonic and intermedial sensibilities of Sapir, Mead, and Benedict, however, were underpinned by the philia/phobia dichotomy that marked early sound studies, which, as Reichel finds, is especially evident in their poetry. Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives includes a 62-page appendix listing “the complete poetry” of the three anthropologists along with “publication details and archival locations” of this corpus that consists of more than 400 published and 600 unpublished poems (6). This is itself a substantial scholarly accomplishment, but it is merely the prelude [End Page 186] to Reichel’s main contribution, which she describes as “the first sustained study” of these anthropologists’ poetry (5). By this, she means that she has brought to bear the methods of literary studies, including “close reading” and “new historicism” (24), to analyze the poems both as discrete literary objects and in relation to the historical conditions of their production. Reichel contrasts her approach with that of the...

  PublisherDOI

• Acknowledgments

  New York University Press eBooks · 2022

  • Geography

  colleagues, mentors, coaches, and the social memory and lived experiences of African Americans, both female and male.It has been full of ups and downs, but

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eric Gable

  31 shared

• Daniel A. Segal

  Yale University

  10 shared

• Daniel Shapiro

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  8 shared

• Stephen K. Urice

  8 shared

• Janet Blake

  8 shared

• Laura Goldblatt

  University of Virginia

  6 shared

• David Löwenthal

  5 shared

• Suzanne G. Cusick

  4 shared