Faculty
Elizabeth Crane 
Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Office: Palamountain Hall 222
Phone: 518-580-5462
Email: ecrane@skidmore.edu
Education:
- Ph.D., Anthropology, Rutgers University
- M.A., Anthropology, Columbia University
- B.A., Middlebury College
Research and interests:
My work is focused on shifting conceptualizations of philanthropy, both in China and in the United States. My research interests include: the study of morality and “doing good”; wealth and inequality; gender, sexuality, and feminism; and the intersection of “othering” practices with experiences of and desires for emotional intimacy across difference.
After studying Anthropology, English Literature, and Mandarin Chinese in college, I spent several years volunteering, interning, and working in the (feminist) philanthropic sector in New York City. The many questions that arose for me during this period brought me back to academia to pursue a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology. Now, I locate myself at the intersection of philanthropy and anthropology—philanthropology—if you will.
My current book project investigates a phenomenon of “new philanthropy” (新慈善，xin cishan) emerging in the People’s Republic of China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork inside recently founded philanthropy training organizations in Beijing, my research argues that “new philanthropy” challenges existing universalist notions of what philanthropy is, or ought to be, and rethinks charitable giving and its social and discursive effects. For example, instead of using the customary framework of “impact evaluation” to measure the “outcomes” of Chinese charitable giving, I focus on ways that both program organizers and philanthropists-in-training are redefining the concept of “philanthropy” through sometimes contradictory paradigms: as a new form of collectivization and redistribution, as means for passing wealth and status to the next generation, and as a way of growing China’s soft power abroad. I am particularly interested in researching and understanding “philanthropic subjectification”—the process of coming to see oneself as a philanthropist. It is through this lens that I am also developing a project to investigate self-identified “feminist philanthropists” and “redistributive philanthropists” in the United States who are, seemingly, seeking to dismantle the very systems of socioeconomic inequality that put them in the position of being philanthropists in the first place.