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Jonathan M. Marks
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jonathan M. Marks is a professor of biological anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is a significant figure in anthropology, especially on the topic of race. Marks is skeptical of genetic explanations of human behavior, of "race" as a biological category, and of science as a rationalistic endeavor. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Tim D. White
1950 - Present (74 years)
Tim D. White is an American paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for leading the team which discovered Ardi, the type specimen of Ardipithecus ramidus, a 4.4 million-year-old likely human ancestor. Prior to that discovery, his early career was notable for his work on Lucy as Australopithecus afarensis with discoverer Donald Johanson.
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Donald Johanson
1943 - Present (81 years)
Donald Carl Johanson is an American paleoanthropologist. He is known for discovering, with Yves Coppens and Maurice Taieb, the fossil of a female hominin australopithecine known as "Lucy" in the Afar Triangle region of Hadar, Ethiopia.
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Anthony F. C. Wallace
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Anthony Francis Clarke Wallace was a Canadian-American anthropologist who specialized in Native American cultures, especially the Iroquois. His research expressed an interest in the intersection of cultural anthropology and psychology. He was famous for the theory of revitalization movements.
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Conrad Phillip Kottak
1942 - Present (82 years)
Conrad Phillip Kottak is an American anthropologist. Kottak is currently a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Michigan, where he has been teaching since 1968. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and he did extensive research in Brazil and Madagascar, visiting societies there and writing books about them.
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Edward T. Hall
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
Edward Twitchell Hall, Jr. was an American anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher. He is remembered for developing the concept of proxemics and exploring cultural and social cohesion, and describing how people behave and react in different types of culturally defined personal space. Hall was an influential colleague of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller.
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Sol Tax
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
Sol Tax was an American anthropologist. He is best known for creating action anthropology and his studies of the Meskwaki, or Fox, Indians, for "action-anthropological" research titled the Fox Project, and for founding the academic journal Current Anthropology. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1935 and, together with Fred Eggan, was a student of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown.
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Michael Harner
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Michael James Harner was an anthropologist, educator and author. His 1980 book, The Way of the Shaman: a Guide to Power and Healing, has been foundational in the development and popularization of Core shamanism as a new age path of personal development for adherents of neoshamanism. He also founded the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.
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Michael Taussig
1940 - Present (84 years)
Areas of Specialization: Medical Anthropology Michael Taussig is a professor at Columbia University. He earned a medical degree from the University of Sydney and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the London School of Economics. He has published research in the area of medical anthropology and is known for his work with the idea of commodity fetishism. In his book, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, he promotes the study of people living on the fringes of the economy, such as indigenous peoples, as a way of creating contrast with traditionally studied populations. Much of his work is filtered through the lens of the work of Walter Benjamin.
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Edward Said
1935 - 2003 (68 years)
Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian American academic, literary critic and political activist. A professor of literature at Columbia University, he was among the founders of postcolonial studies. Born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.
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George E. Marcus
1946 - Present (78 years)
George Emanuel Marcus is an American professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine who focuses on the anthropology of elites. Education and life Marcus received a B.A. from Yale University in 1968 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1976. He spent the 1982–83 academic year at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where he came up with the idea for Anthropology as Cultural Critique, which he co-wrote with Michael M. J. Fischer and published in 1986 .
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Ian Hodder
1948 - Present (76 years)
Ian Richard Hodder is a British archaeologist and pioneer of postprocessualist theory in archaeology that first took root among his students and in his own work between 1980 and 1990. At this time he had such students as Henrietta Moore, Ajay Pratap, Nandini Rao, Mike Parker Pearson, Paul Lane, John Muke, Sheena Crawford, Nick Merriman, Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley. , he is Dunlevie Family Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University in the United States.
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Melford Spiro
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Melford Elliot Spiro was an American cultural anthropologist specializing in religion and psychological anthropology. He is known for his critiques of the pillars of contemporary anthropological theory—wholesale cultural determinism, radical cultural relativism, and virtually limitless cultural diversity—and for his emphasis on the theoretical importance of unconscious desires and beliefs in the study of stability and change in social and cultural systems, particularly in respect to the family, politics, and religion. Explicated in numerous theoretical publications, they are empirically exemp...
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Douglas H. Ubelaker
1946 - Present (78 years)
Douglas H. Ubelaker is an American forensic anthropologist. He works as a curator for the Smithsonian Institution, and has published numerous papers and monographs that have helped establish modern procedures in forensic anthropology. He has also done work in Latin America, with Native Americans, and has assisted the Federal Bureau of Investigation in forensic cases.
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Roy D'Andrade
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
Roy Goodwin D'Andrade was one of the founders of cognitive anthropology. Roy D'Andrade grew up in Metuchen, New Jersey, D'Andrade matriculated at Rutgers University but left to fulfill his military service. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Connecticut. He then studied in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, from which he received his PhD in Social Anthropology. He taught at Stanford University from 1962-1969. He then moved to the University of California, San Diego, where he was professor of Anthropology until 2003 and served as department chair for three separate terms.
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John Arundel Barnes
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
John Arundel Barnes FBA was an Australian and British social anthropologist. Until his death in 2010, Barnes held the post of Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Fellow of Churchill College. From 1969 to 1982, he held the post of Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Previous positions include faculty posts in social anthropology at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University in Canberra, He also was associated with Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, University College London, St John's College, Cambridge, Balliol College, Oxford and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute.
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Pascal Boyer
2000 - Present (24 years)
Pascal Robert Boyer is an American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist of French origin, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on evolutionary psychology and anthropology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He studied philosophy and anthropolo...
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Ernest Gellner
1925 - 1995 (70 years)
Ernest André Gellner FRAI was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist described by The Daily Telegraph, when he died, as one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals, and by The Independent as a "one-man crusader for critical rationalism".
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Akhil Gupta
1959 - Present (65 years)
Akhil Gupta is an Indian-American anthropologist whose research focuses on the anthropology of the state, development, as well as on postcolonialism. He is currently a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a former president of the American Anthropological Association.
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Gananath Obeyesekere
1930 - Present (94 years)
Gananath Obeyesekere is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and has done much work in his home country of Sri Lanka. His research focuses on psychoanalysis and anthropology and the ways in which personal symbolism is related to religious experience, in addition to the European exploration of Polynesia in the 18th century and after, and the implications of these voyages for the development of ethnography. His books include Land Tenure in Village Ceylon, Medusa's Hair, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, Buddhism Transformed , The Work of Culture, The Apotheosis of Captain Co...
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Laura Nader
1930 - Present (94 years)
Laura Nader is an American anthropologist. She has been a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley since 1960. She was the first woman to receive a tenure-track position in the department. She is also the older sister of U.S. activist, consumer advocate, and frequent third-party candidate Ralph Nader, and the younger sister of community advocate Shafeek Nader and social scientist Claire Nader.
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Robin Dunbar
1947 - Present (77 years)
Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar is a British biological anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, and specialist in primate behaviour. Dunbar is professor emeritus of evolutionary psychology of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships".
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Ray Birdwhistell
1918 - 1994 (76 years)
Ray L. Birdwhistell was an American anthropologist who founded kinesics as a field of inquiry and research. Birdwhistell coined the term kinesics, meaning "facial expression, gestures, posture and gait, and visible arm and body movements". He estimated that "no more than 30 to 35 percent of the social meaning of a conversation or an interaction is carried by the words." Stated more broadly, he argued that "words are not the only containers of social knowledge." He proposed other technical terms, including kineme, and many others less frequently used today. Birdwhistell had at least as much i...
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Richard Wrangham
1948 - Present (76 years)
Richard Walter Wrangham is an English anthropologist and primatologist; he is Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. His research and writing have involved ape behavior, human evolution, violence, and cooking.
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Sherry Ortner
1941 - Present (83 years)
Sherry Beth Ortner is an American cultural anthropologist and has been a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA since 2004. Biography Ortner grew up in a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, and attended Weequahic High School, as did Philip Roth and Richie Roberts. She received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 1962. She then studied anthropology at the University of Chicago with Clifford Geertz and obtained her Ph.D. in anthropology in 1970 for her fieldwork among the Sherpas in Nepal. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Kira Hall
1962 - Present (62 years)
Kira Hall is professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, as well as director for the Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice , at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The majority of Hall's work focuses on language in India and the United States, with special attention to organizations of gender and sexuality. A special focus of her work has been the linguistic and sociocultural practices of Hindi-speaking Hijras in northern India, a transgender group often discussed in the anthropological literature as a "third sex."
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Veena Das
1945 - Present (79 years)
Veena Das, FBA in India is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. Her areas of theoretical specialisation include the anthropology of violence, social suffering, and the state. Das has received multiple international awards including the Ander Retzius Gold Medal, delivered the prestigious Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture and was named a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Madeleine Leininger
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Madeleine Leininger was a nursing theorist, nursing professor and developer of the concept of transcultural nursing. First published in 1961, her contributions to nursing theory involve the discussion of what it is to care.
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Dorothy E. Smith
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Dorothy Edith Smith was a British-born Canadian ethnographer, feminist studies scholar, sociologist, and writer with research interests in a variety of disciplines. These include women's studies, feminist theory, psychology, and educational studies. Smith was also involved in certain subfields of sociology, such as the sociology of knowledge, family studies, and methodology. She founded the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist standpoint theory and institutional ethnography.
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Roy Wagner
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Roy Wagner was an American cultural anthropologist who specialized in symbolic anthropology. Background Wagner received a B.A. in Medieval History from Harvard University , and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago , where he studied under David M. Schneider. He taught at Southern Illinois University and Northwestern University before accepting the chairmanship of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, where he taught until his death. He resided in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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Ward Goodenough
1919 - 2013 (94 years)
Ward Hunt Goodenough II was an American anthropologist, who has made contributions to kinship studies, linguistic anthropology, cross-cultural studies, and cognitive anthropology. Biography and major works Goodenough was born May 30, 1919, in Cambridge Massachusetts, the son of Helen Miriam and Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, a scholar in the history of religion, who was then a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School. He was a brother to noted solid-state physicist John B. Goodenough. As a child his family moved between Europe and Germany as his father conducted research on a Ph.D. As a result Goodenough developed an early interest in German and languages in general.
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Lewis Binford
1931 - 2011 (80 years)
Lewis Roberts Binford was an American archaeologist known for his influential work in archaeological theory, ethnoarchaeology and the Paleolithic period. He is widely considered among the most influential archaeologists of the later 20th century, and is credited with fundamentally changing the field with the introduction of processual archaeology in the 1960s. Binford's influence was controversial, however, and most theoretical work in archaeology in the late 1980s and 1990s was explicitly construed as either a reaction to or in support of the processual paradigm. Recent appraisals have judg...
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Fiona Graham
1961 - Present (63 years)
Fiona Caroline Graham was an Australian anthropologist working as a geisha in Japan. She made her debut as a geisha in 2007 in the Asakusa district of Tokyo under the name Sayuki as a part of her anthropological study, and was working in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo.
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J. Clyde Mitchell
1918 - 1995 (77 years)
James Clyde Mitchell was a British sociologist and anthropologist. In 1937 Mitchell helped found the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute group of social anthropologists/sociologists, now a part of the University of Zambia. He was influenced by Max Gluckman and conducted important research on social network analysis at the University of Manchester . In the 1940s he carried out field research into social systems and social conditions in Central Africa interviewing heads of households in villages and urban areas and observing customs. In 1952 he was on the editorial committee of the Northern Rhodesia...
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Thor Heyerdahl
1914 - 2002 (88 years)
Thor Heyerdahl KStJ was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with a background in biology with specialization in zoology, botany and geography. Heyerdahl is notable for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he sailed 8,000 km across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. The expedition was designed to demonstrate that ancient people could have made long sea voyages, creating contacts between societies. This was linked to a diffusionist model of cultural development.
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Koentjaraningrat
1923 - 1999 (76 years)
Kanjeng Pangeran Haryo Prof. Dr. Koentjaraningrat was an Indonesian anthropologist. He is sometimes referred to as "the father of Indonesian anthropology". Biography Koentjaraningrat was born in Yogyakarta, Indonesia on 15 June 1923 to a Pakualaman family. His mother wanted him to obtain a Dutch education, so he was educated at Europeesche Lagere School, followed by Middelbare Uitgebreid Lager Onderwijs and Algemeen Middelbare School in Yogyakarta, later moving to Jakarta to continue his schooling. He became fluent in Dutch and English.
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Paul Rabinow
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Areas of Specialization: Anthropology of Reason Paul Rabinow was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC). He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has also studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, France. He has held Fulbright fellowships at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro and the University of Iceland. A recognized scholar on the works of Michel Foucault, and his “anthropology of reason,” Rabinow became a famous ant...
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Jean Comaroff
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jean Comaroff is Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. She is an expert on the effects of colonialism on people in Southern Africa. Until 2012, Jean was the Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town.
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Paul Farmer
1959 - 2022 (63 years)
Paul Edward Farmer was an American medical anthropologist and physician. Farmer held an MD and PhD from Harvard University, where he was a University Professor and the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was the co-founder and chief strategist of Partners In Health , an international non-profit organization that since 1987 has provided direct health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. He was professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Global Health Equ...
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John Comaroff
1945 - Present (79 years)
John Comaroff is the Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, and Oppenheimer Research Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. Comaroff also serves as a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Cape Town and his doctorate from the London School of Economics. Comaroff has held numerous influential teaching positions, includng the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago as well as positions at Duke University, Tel Aviv University, and University of Wales.
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Gayle Rubin
1949 - Present (75 years)
Gayle S. Rubin is an American cultural anthropologist, theorist and activist, best known for her pioneering work in feminist theory and queer studies. Her essay "The Traffic in Women" had a lasting influence in second-wave feminism and early gender studies, by arguing that gender oppression could not be adequately explained by Marxist conceptions of the patriarchy. Her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex" is widely regarded as a founding text of gay and lesbian studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory. She has written on a range of subjects including the politics of sexuality, gender oppression, sa...
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Renato Rosaldo
1941 - Present (83 years)
Renato Rosaldo is an American cultural anthropologist. He has done field research among the Ilongots of northern Luzon, Philippines, and he is the author of Ilongot Headhunting: 1883–1974: A Study in Society and History and Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis .
Go to ProfileJohn Hawks is a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He also maintains a paleoanthropology blog. Contrary to the common view that cultural evolution has made human biological evolution insignificant, Hawks believes that human evolution has sped up in recent history.
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Johannes Fabian
1937 - Present (87 years)
Johannes Fabian is an emeritus professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His ethnographic and historical research focuses on religious movements, language, work, and popular culture in the Shaba mining region of Zaire . His theoretical and critical work addresses questions of epistemology and history in anthropology, notably the influential book Time and the Other , which has become a classic in the field of anthropology.
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Nur Yalman
1931 - Present (93 years)
Nur Yalman is a leading Turkish social anthropologist at Harvard University, where he serves as senior Research Professor of Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies. Career Yalman received his high school diploma from Robert College, Istanbul, one of Turkey’s premier private high schools. For his BA and PhD, he studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge University under the mentorship of Edmund Leach and carried out fieldwork in Sri Lanka. At Cambridge, Yalman was a Bye-Fellow of Peterhouse, and subsequently joined the anthropology faculty at the University of Chicago. During his stay at Chicago, he served as director for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 1968-1972.
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Nancy Scheper-Hughes
1944 - Present (80 years)
Areas of Specialization: Medical Anthropology Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a program director and professor for medical anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated from University of California at Berkeley with a B.A. in social science and a Ph.D. in anthropology. She also served a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health, Laboratory of Human Development at Harvard University. Her research has specialized in many areas, including, but not limited to: cultural forensic anthropology, human organ trafficking, invisible genocides, Pope Francis, violence, death squads, and epidemics.
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Didier Fassin
1955 - Present (69 years)
Areas of Specialization: Medical Anthropology Didier Fassin is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science for the Institute for Advanced Study, the Chair of Public Health at the College de France, and holds Direction of Studies role in Political and Moral Anthropology at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He earned his MD from Pierre and Marie Curie University, an M.A. from the University of Paris, and a Ph.D. from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. His career began in the medical field, during which time he served as an infectious disease specialist. He moved on to an anthropological approach, studying health inequities in Africa.
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Melvin Konner
1946 - Present (78 years)
Melvin Joel Konner is an American anthropologist who is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University. He studied at Brooklyn College, CUNY , where he met Marjorie Shostak, whom he later married and with whom he had three children. He also has a PhD from Harvard University and a MD from Harvard Medical School .
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Philippe Descola
1949 - Present (75 years)
Areas of Specialization: Ethnology, Social Anthropology Philippe Descola is chair of anthropology at the Collège de France, most well-known for his research regarding the Achuar, an Amazonian community that was one of the last to be contacted by the outside world. He lived with and researched with the Achuar in Ecuador from 1976 to 1978. He is a highly-sought lecturer, and has delivered many notable lectures including the Munro Lecture at Edinburgh, the Victor Goldschmidt Lecture at Heidelberg, the Clifford Geertz Memorial Lecture at Princeton, and the Radcliffe-Brown Lecture at the British Academy.
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