Don Kulick
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Don Kulick is Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden and Visiting Chair Professor of Anthropology at Hong Kong University. His research spans topics ranging from language death to the anthropology of fat. He directs the Swedish Research Council-funded research program Engaging Vulnerability and the ERC Advanced Grant research project Out of Sight: Exploring Social (Im)perceptibility.
His most recent books include A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea (2019, Algonquin); Changing Vulnerability (co-edited with Michel Naepels, 2026; SAR Press) and Clashing Vulnerabilities, Disability and Conflict (co-edited with Simo Vehmas, 2026; Routledge).
Don Kulick joins the Paris IAS in May 2026 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Imperceptibility; invisibility; migrant labour; meat-processing industry; Papua New Guinea.
Out of Sight: Exploring Social (Im)perceptibility
Inspired by sociologist Erving Goffman’s hastily-sketched concept of “non-person”, my project is a broad empirical exploration of what it means to be socially imperceptible, either unwillingly or by design. Depending on one’s perspective, being not really there can be humiliating or liberating, or perhaps a bit of both at once. Goffman noted that being not really there imposed limitations, but it also provided such persons with access to spaces and information that gave them implicit sources of power.
The larger research project includes people who navigate the perceptible/imperceptible border in a variety of contexts and in a range of ways: the people being documented are courtroom interpreters, peer reviewers, artists who want to be anonymous, Roma people who actively manipulate modes of being visible and invisible, and missing migrants whose identities only become public knowledge when they disappear.
This project in particular concerns the meat-processing industry (i.e. abattoirs) and the people who work in them. By examining how these different kinds of people are made imperceptible and make themselves imperceptible, the project provides a framework in which we might see imperceptibility as a social achievement that has a range of forms, meanings, and consequences. It contributes to how we might think about social, discursive, and interactional processes of invisibility, silence, and ignorance.
Key publications
Don Kulick, Naepels Michel. Changing Vulnerability. School of Advanced Research Press, 2026.
Don Kulick. A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea. Algonquin Books, 2019.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18357/anthropologica63220211083
Don Kulick, Jens Rydström. Loneliness and its Opposite: Sex, Disability and the Ethics of Engagement. Duke University Press, 2015.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11sms0n
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