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Faculty Research Interests
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Research is carried out by a community of scholars composed of faculty, graduate students, visiting scholars and postdoctoral scholars. They work in every corner of the world, and their research spans the entire breadth of anthropology, from medical and biological anthropology to folklore and linguistic research.

Alexander Andreeff is an exchange program PhD-student from Gothenburg University. He is an archaeologist conducting research about the iconography, spatial relations, and the social context of the Viking-Age Picture Stones from the Island of Gotland, Sweden.

Deanna Barenboim is studying Yucatec Mayan people in the Bay Area.

Alexis Bunten supported by a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, is looking at indigenous partipation in the cultural tourism industry. This work considers the ways that individuals commodify their identity in a late capitalist setting actively challenging simplistic critiques of self-commodification as "selling out" or "being exploited" and argues instead for a more agentive perspective on the processes involved. This approach to the practices surrounding self-commodification reveals new ways of looking at constructions of the self, and challenges conventional understandings of emotional labor, identity politics, and the politics of representation.

Alexandre Chevalier's research topics include: archaeology, Andes, botanical macroremains, phytoliths, starch grains, political economy, territory exploitation, agriculture, mid-range societies, plant diffusion, technology transfer.

Aaron Cicourel is a research professor of Cognitive Science, Pediatrics and Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. Professor Cicourel is a Linguistic Anthropologist and often collaborates with Professor William Hanks and students in our department.

Maria Cruz-Berrocal is creating a corpus of cartographic, GIS, geographic, and comparative data on neolithic and medieval rock art of the Iberian peninsula centered on sites at Nerpio and Valltorta.  Using this data to analyse rock art as a social institution used by self-forming social groups comprised of individual agents.

Limor Samimian Darash is studying Israeli popular attitudes towards and planned defenses against the possible use of a “nonconventional weapon” by terrorists.  Questioning what constitutes a “non-conventional weapon” and how it comes to be constructed as the ultimate threat.

Pierre Deleage's research interests include the elaboration of a theory of traditional knowledge based on two concepts: metaknowledge and imitation as specific forms of learning. He is working on a new account of the ritual usage of masks, fetishes, and various Amerindian mnemonic devices.

Pauline Kolenda is scholar studying caste, kinship, and household structure in South Asia.

Robert Manlove is Dean Emeritus of the School of Science and Math at City College of San Francisco. He has been working with Professor Emeritus George De Vos on cross-disciplinary cultural narratives.

Rachel Morgain is performing an ethnographic study of urban neo-pagan groups in Melbourne, Australia, and San Franisco, California, in order to study models of society and self arising from their non-individualist worldview.

Alexandra Retkowski is studying the relationships and conflicts that emerge around aging and death; modeling how relationships are commemorated and continued at life’s end. 

Arturo Alvarez Roldan is Associate Professor at the University of Granada (Spain). He is now working on two research projects. First: Memory, language and identity in the life stories and photographic record of people who were born in Puebla de Don Fadrique (Spain) before 1936. Second: Conflict , culture and violence by intimate partners among young people.

Akitomo Shingae is conducting anthropological and sociological fieldwork on a research project considering the global problems of HIV/AIDS through an analysis of male homosexuals of Japanese descent in the USA.

Mattias Viktorin in a Fulbright Scholar, studying the changing role of the miltiary. More specifically, he is interested in how security, humanitarianism, and neoliberalism intersect in emergent forms of civil-military engagements with the world.

Vicki Wedel a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, is conducting skeletal analysis of human remains from slaves and freedmen of America’s slave owning past.

Jinfu Zhang works on the Tourists' Ritual, Sacred Journeys and the social impact on religious lives in Tibet.