Dr. Ramones is a first-generation scholar from Kalihi, O‘ahu. He holds a BA in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, and an MPhil and PhD in Anthropology from New York University. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Dr. Ramones was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.
Publications:
Red Dirt: Dialectics of Indigeneity (Book manuscript under contract with Princeton University Press)
Forthcoming “‘Class Assimilation’: Racialization, Class, and Indigeneity in Hawaiʻi.” in Current Anthropology
2024 “‘Insurgent Indigeneity’: A New Threshold of Indigenous Politics.” American Quarterly 76(3): 567-590. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2024.a937118
2023 “Creation stories: Carrying our elders of Indigenous media.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 13(3): 716-720. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/728368
2023 “Endurance of Difference: Insights from Contemporary Native Hawaiian Media.” Visual Anthropology Review. 39(1): 82-101. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12291
2023 “Indigenous Media: Protocols, Circulation and the Politics of Accountability.” with Angelo Baca, Teresa Martinez-Chavez, Teresa Montoya. Visual Anthropology Review 39(1): 128-143. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12294
2022 “Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania 2021 Conference Distinguished Lecture: Contemporary Filmmaking in Oceania.” Oceania 92(2): 172-194. with Marina Alofagia McCartney and Martin Maden. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/ocea.5344
2021 “Capitalist Transformation and Settler Colonialism: Theorizing the Interface.” American Anthropologist 123(4): 741-752. with Sally Engle Merry. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13655
Dr. Ikaika Ramones (Kanaka Maoli) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies. His research uses anthropological and critical theory frameworks to explore how conceptualizations of indigeneity are remade and contested from within, along what lines, and to what end. His work engages Indigenous studies (with a focus on Hawaiʻi and broader Oceania), political economy, critical theory, political theory, media studies, and social movements.
His book manuscript, Red Dirt: Dialectics of Indigeneity (under contract with Princeton University Press), examines how distinct Native Hawaiian identities are reproduced and negotiated across contemporary elite Native institutions and grassroots movements. By contributing a political economic and class analysis, it reveals how formations of Hawaiianness emerge from concrete social conditions. Red Dirt considers how Indigenous actors attempt to commensurate, appropriate, protect, or articulate conflicting economic systems, notions of value, and cultural politics. In following these internal contradictions, he explores underlying dynamics of change in Native Hawaiian society. Red Dirt also experiments with the praxis-oriented application of ethnography by actors on the ground.
His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation Fellowship, the Wenner-Gren
Foundation (Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship), the Mellon Mays Fellowship, and the Society for Visual Anthropology / Robert Lemelson Fellowship.
