10 June 2006 | Leiden, The Netherlands


LEIDEN - Rivke Jaffe received her PhD from the University of Leiden on June 15 2006. Drs. Jaffe was the first student of the Jacob Gelt Dekker Institute to engage in a 4 year PhD program. Her thesis: "Urban Blight in the Caribbean" is based on research of areas on Curacao and in Jamaica.

Rivke Jaffe was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA on August 16, 1978. She attended the Stedelijk Gymnasium Leiden, the Netherlands, from 1990 to 1996. Following this, she studied Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, specializing in environment and development at Leiden University, receiving her MA diploma in March 2001. Her MA thesis studied solid waste management in Kingston, Jamaica.

In 2001, she was awarded a four-year Jacob Gelt Dekker Institute Scholarship to do PhD research at the Research School for Asian, African and Amerindian Studies (CNWS), Leiden University. She spent a total of twelve months conducting fieldwork in Willemstad, Curacao and Kingston, Jamaica, researching diverging perceptions of the urban environment.

Drs. Jaffe's PhD thesis, titled ‘Urban Blight in the Caribbean: City, Environment and Culture in Curacao and Jamaica', studied different approaches to the urban environment at the level of government and NGO actors, and at the level of residents in four low-income neighborhoods in Kingston and Willemstad.
Since September 2005 she has been working as a postdoctoral researcher at the KITLV (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies), where she is conducting research on the NWO project ‘Suriname: The predicament of a multi-ethnic nation', together with Anouk de Koning. Rivke's part of this research project focuses mainly on demography, ethnicity and class in contemporary Suriname. She is studying structural and institutional factors shaping the political economy of multiculturalism in Suriname, as well as the lived experience of multiculturalism/pluralism at the neighborhood level.

Rivke Jaffe is board member of the Netherlands Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (NALACS) and is secretary of the Leiden Circle of Urban Anthropologists (KLU). Her research interests include Caribbean studies, urban anthropology, environment, poverty, violence, and music.


Selected publications
‘Repertory grid en sentence completion: twee kwalitatieve methoden in de Caraïbische praktijk'. Kwalon 29, Vol. 10, No. 2. 2005.

‘Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture' (book review). Social Anthropology, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 237-238. June 2005.

‘Informal Waste Management' (with Peter J.M. Nas). Environment, Development and Sustainability, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 337-353. 2004.

‘Working with Waste' (with Peter J.M. Nas). In: Brigitta Benzing and Bernd Herrmann (eds.), Exploitation and Over-Exploitation in Societies Past and Present, pp. 301-308. Münster: LIT. 2003.

Framing Indonesian Realities: Essays in symbolic anthropology in honour of Reimar Schefold. Edited book (with Peter J.M. Nas and Gerard Persoon). Leiden: KITLV Press. 2003.