Research Interest

The contemporary United States. Water and environment. Indigeneity and settler colonialism. The anthropology of citizenship, sovereignty, and nation. Feminist anthropology. The Florida Everglades. Money and value. Gender and family.

Biography

Jessica Cattelino studies and teaches about sociocultural life in the contemporary United States. She is currently a PI in the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS).

Her research focuses on economy, nature, indigeneity, and settler colonialism. Her first book, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke University Press, 2008; winner of the Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of North America), examines the cultural, political, and economic stakes of tribal casinos for Florida Seminoles. Currently, she is writing an ethnography about the cultural value of water in the Florida Everglades, with a focus on the Seminole Big Cypress Reservation and the nearby agricultural town of Clewiston. She also is collaborating with photographer Adam Nadel on a museum exhibition about the inextricability of people and nature in the Everglades.

Her current research is funded by the National Science Foundation (Law and Social Sciences), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. Additionally, she is funded through participation in a National Science Foundation Long Term Ecological Network on the Florida Coastal Everglades, for which she is undertaking wildly interdisciplinary collaboration as a co-author of a paper on phosphorus and will conduct ethnographic research on the social life of a stormwater treatment area.

Publications

Books
n.d. Water Ties: An Everglades Ethnography. Reviewed and in final revisions for the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series, Duke University Press.

2008 High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty.  Duke University Press.
Awarded the Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of North America; Honorable Mention for the Gregory Bateson Book Prize, Society for Cultural Anthropology

Articles and Chapters
n.d. Cattelino, Jessica R., Kelsey Kim, Courtney Cecale, Megan Baker, PwintPhyu Nandar, Dalila Ozier, Virdiana Velez, Michael Kim. “Gender and Residential Water Use in Los Angeles.” In preparation.
n.d. Cattelino, Jessica R. “Sovereign-ties in the Florida Everglades.” Under review in Carroll, Clint and Hunt, Sarah, eds. Indigenous Political Ecology. Under review at the University of Minnesota Press.
n.d. Cattelino, Jessica R. “Beyond Which Human?” In preparation.
2023 Cattelino, Jessica R. “Sovereign Interdependencies.” In Deborah A. Thomas and Joseph Masco, eds., Sovereignty Unhinged: An Illustrated Primer for the Study of Present Intensities, Disavowals, and Temporal Derangements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 139-161.
2023 Cattelino, Jessica R. Comment on “What Tradition Affords: Articulations of Indigeneity in Contemporary Bushfire Management” by Timothy Neale. Current Anthropology 64(1):84-85.
2022 Cattelino, Jessica R. and Audra Simpson. 2022. “Rethinking Indigeneity:  Scholarship at the Intersection of Native American Studies and Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 51:365-381.
2020 Cattelino, Jessica R. 2020. “Place at a Distance.” In “Flash Ethnography,” Carole McGranahan and Nomi Stone, editors, American Ethnologist website, 26 October, https://americanethnologist.org/features/collections/flash-ethnography/place-at-a-distance
2019 Cattelino, Jessica, Georgina Drew, and Ruth Morgan. “Water Flourishing in the Anthropocene.” Cultural Studies Review 25(2):135-152.
2019 Of Climate and Chilling Effects. Public Culture 31(2):215-234.
2019 “From Green to Green: The Environmentalization of Agriculture.” Journal for the Anthropology of North America 22 (2): 135–38.
2019 Rivera-Monroy, Victor H., Jessica Cattelino, Jeffrey R. Wozniak, Katrina Schwartz, Gregory B. Noe, Edward Castaneda-Moya, and Gregory R. Koch. 2019. The Life of P: A Biogeochemical and Sociopolitical Challenge in the Everglades. In The Coastal Everglades: The Dynamics of Social-Ecological Transformation in the South Florida Landscape, edited by Daniel L Childers, Evelyn Gaiser, and Laura Ogden. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 99–128.
2019 Stakeholders, Gender, and the Politics of Water. American Anthropologist (editor reviewed), January 22. http://www.americananthropologist.org/2019/01/22/3032/
2018 From Locke to Slots: Money and the Politics of Indigeneity. Comparative Studies in Society and History 60(2):274-307.
2018 Indian Gaming, Renewed Self-Governance, and Economic Strength. An interview by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui in Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pp. 65-77.
2017 Loving the Native: Invasive Species and the Cultural Politics of Flourishing. In Ursula Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann, eds. The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities. London: Routledge, pp. 129-137.
2015 North America: Sociocultural Aspects. In: James D. Wright (editor-in-chief), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Vol 17. Oxford: Elsevier. pp. 22–26.
2011 “One Hamburger at a Time”: Revisiting the State-Society Divide with the Seminole Tribe of Florida and Hard Rock international: with CA comments by Thabo Mokgatlha and Kgosi Leruo Molotlegi. Current Anthropology 52(S3): S138-149. Supplementary issue: Corporate Lives: New Perspectives on the Social Life of the Corporate Form.  D.J. Partridge, M. Welker, and R. Hardin, eds.
2011 Thoughts on the U.S. as a Settler Society (Plenary Remarks, 2010 SANA Conference).  North American Dialogue: Newsletter of the Society for the Anthropology of North America 14(1):1-6.
2010 Anthropologies of the United States.  Annual Review of Anthropology 39:275-292.
2010 The Double Bind of American Indian Need-Based Sovereignty.  Cultural Anthropology 25(2):235-62.
Awarded the Cultural Horizons Prize by the Society for Cultural Anthropology
2010 Termination Redux?  Seminole Citizenship and Economy from Truman to Gaming.  In B. Hosmer, ed. Native Americans and the Legacy of Harry Truman.  Pp. 122-135. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press.
2009 Fungibility: Florida Seminole Casino Dividends and the Fiscal Politics of Indigeneity.  American Anthropologist 111(2):190-200.
2009 Florida Seminoles and the Cultural Politics of the Everglades.  Occasional Paper from the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study.  May, Paper Number 36.  Available at http://www.sss.ias.edu/publications/occasional.php
2008 Gaming.  In Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 2, Indians in Contemporary Society, Garrick A. Bailey, vol. ed., William C. Sturtevant, general editor. Pp. 148-156.  Washington: Smithsonian Institution.
2007 Florida Seminole Gaming and Local Sovereign Interdependency.  In D. Cobb and L. Fowler, eds. Beyond Red Power: Rethinking Twentieth-Century American Indian Politics.  Pp. 262-79.  Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press.
2006 Florida Seminole Housing and the Social Meanings of Sovereignty.  Comparative Studies in Society and History 48(3):699-726.
2005 Tribal Gaming and Indigenous Sovereignty, with Notes from Seminole Country.  American Studies (Special issue on Indigenous People of the United States) 46:(3/4): 187-204; co-published in Indigenous Studies Today 1 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006).
2004 Casino Roots: The Cultural Production of Twentieth-Century Seminole Economic Development. In Hosmer, B. and O’Neill, C., eds. Native Pathways: Economic Development and American Indian Culture in the Twentieth Century.  Pp. 66-90. Boulder: University of Colorado Press.
Winner of the Western History Association Arrell M. Gibson Award and reviewed in the Journal of American Ethnic History 25(1), 2005.
2004 (with William Sturtevant) Florida Seminole and Miccosukee.  In Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 14, Southeast, Raymond D. Fogelson, vol. ed., William C. Sturtevant, general editor. Pp. 429-449.  Washington: Smithsonian Institution.
2004 The Difference that Citizenship Makes: Civilian Crime Prevention on the Lower East Side. PoLAR (Political and Legal Anthropology Review) 27(1):114-137.

Projects

Environmental Storytelling Collaboration with KCET

• LENS has partnered with KCET, the nation’s largest independent public media company to produce engaging, research-driven environmental stories.