Social cultural anthropology

Research interests:
My research and teaching focuses largely on comparative social inequality. Other interests include environmental issues and movements, human rights, anthropological ethics, ethnographic methods, and social change in urban, rural and small-scale societies. Geographic areas of special concern are South Asia (especially Himalayan regions of India and Nepal), with secondary interests in American society, the Aleuts and other Arctic and Native American peoples.

My theoretical approach, and its apposite methodology, I call "social interactionist," which articulates with "symbolic interactionism," "ethnomethodology," "cognitive sociology," and recently, "practice theory." That is, it focuses on the relationship among cognition (including perception and understanding), belief (including value), power and behavior. I have taught on these and other topics in Sweden, India and Nepal, and have been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Stockholm and Garhwal University, India.

Recent and current research has been in India and Nepal, dealing with issues of environment and development, and responses to them by local people and by administrators and other outsider elites. My most intensive such work has dealt comparatively with Chipko, the famous grassroots environmental movement in India's Garhwal Himalayas, and the anti-big dam movements in India and Nepal, together with governmental responses to them.

For some 40 years I have pursued a longitudinal study of social inequality (caste, gender, class) and environment in their historical context in a Garhwal village (Sirkanda) and its region. By way of comparison in both culture and scale, I have studied ethnic diversity and inequality in the central bazaar of a city of the adjacent plains (Dehra Dun) and its surroundings.

Earlier I worked in an Aleutian village on issues of economic, political and social change. This first-hand contact with a "small-scale" society in 20th Century America led to my interest in "The Great Hunter-Gatherer Debate," and its pragmatic and theoretical implications. I became heavily involved in the deconstruction of the "Tasaday hoax", which involved a fraudulent claim during the 1970s-80s, of the discovery of a "stone-age tribe" in Mindinao, Philippines. With regard to ethics, I was co-drafter of the American Anthropological Associations "Principles of Professional Responsibility" (read: "Code of Ethics"), and have engaged in subsequent debates about it.

Representative publications:
2000. Aleut Shamanism: A Thing of the Past, but How Long Past? InFestschrift for William S. Laughlin. B. Froelich and A. Harper, eds.

1999. Seeking Social Justice: Ethnic Politics in India, the United States and Japan. InPlenary Lectures: Second International Human Rights Seminar, 1998. Osaka, Japan: Kansai University.

1994. Anthropology, Development and Public Policy. Occasional Papers in Sociology and Anthropology. Kathmandu, Nepal: Tribhuvan University.

1993. Sanskritization as Female Oppression in India. InSex, and Gender Hierarchies. B. D. Miller, ed.

1991. The Incredible 'Tasaday'. Cultural Survival Quarterly.

1991. Ethics versus Realism in Anthropology. In Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology. C. Fluehr-Lobban, ed. Pp. 38-71. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.