His research tries to understand how sexual mores, racial hierarchies, and class predicaments interact in a changing world. Lancaster is a fellow in the American Anthropological Association. From to , he served as the AAA's media liaison on kinship , the family, and marriage, fielding questions on same-sex marriage from a range of major media organizations. Lancaster's first book, Thanks to God and the Revolution: Religion and Class Consciousness in the New Nicaragua , was a study of liberation theology and other religious currents in Sandinista Nicaragua.
Joining debates on the nature and origins of class consciousness , the book reworked established Marxist understandings of the role of religion in social life. From a Marxist-populist perspective, it views popular or folk religion as a recurring site where poor people reflect on class inequalities and devise understandings of morality and justice consistent with their self-interests. Its main argument is that elements of an implicit class consciousness are discernible in traditional saint's cults and in popular rites and festivities, and that these elements provide a springboard for the subsequent development of forms of explicit class consciousness in liberation theology , Sandinismo , and Marxism.
Lancaster's first book had traced the Sandinista revolution's ascent; his second book examined its decline. Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua was an ethnography of everyday life during the contra war and its attendant economic crisis. Chronicling the lives of three poor families among their networks of friends and kin, it dissects plural and intimate forms of powerβin gender relations, color discriminations, and same-sex relationshipsβthat, Lancaster argues, undermined attempts to construct a revolutionary New Man and Woman and thus subverted the Sandinista project from below.
Weaving semiotics , poststructuralism , and the Bakhtin school into an overarching Marxist approach, Life is Hard traded in the topical eclecticism of cultural studies, setting brisk chapters of media criticism alongside interviews and descriptions of Nicaragua's survival economy. Lancaster's third monograph, The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture , was a polemic against evolutionary psychology and other reductionist explanations for gender roles and sexual orientations.
The book contrasts anthropological and historical perspectives on cultural diversity with evolutionary just-so stories , defending a social constructionist approach to human nature in chapters on sexual selection , masculinity , beauty, the social organization of reproduction, and the gay gene.
