Professor of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
Ruth Adams Building 312
Phone: (732) 932-1139
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Ph.D. Australian National University, 1969

Research Interests

Anthropology and social theory (especially primitivist thought), history of anthropology, kinship, anthropology of religion (especially pseudo-procreative thought), the ethnographic study of human nature; Aboriginal Australia, Lowland South America

Most of my current research involves a return to kinship studies - not the descent/alliance theory of my younger days but the neo-Whorfianism of the new kinship studies inspired primarily by David Schneider. I believe the Schneiderian position to be demonstrably false. More, embedded in this position is a critique of Western civilization that is largely unwarranted, which lends itself to authoritarian and utopian thinking, and which is therefore fundamentally at odds with a free society. I am particularly concerned with the kind of left-of-center politics with which the new relativism is associated and its hegemonic aspirations in academia, especially in humanities and social science departments.

In this connection I am presently working on a model of the "millennialization" of religious thought. I hope to show that this model bears not only upon the new kinship studies but also upon other areas of anthropological inquiry - the Bushman Debate, so-called "radical" feminism, and the new gender studies, especially the claim of parochialism made against Western bipartite gender classification. My intention is to demonstrate that all these enterprises entail a set of primitivist models that cannot be sustained by existing evidence, and that their critique of Western civilization is therefore largely misplaced. The argument comes to the responsible conservative assertion that, for all their faults, Western capitalism, Western representative democracy, and the traditional Western family and gender understandings are fundamentally good things - i.e. have decided roots in our species nature.

Those who would see published examples of my current thinking should have a look at "Universal Systems of Kin Categorization as Primitivist Projects" in ANTHROPOLOGICAL FORUM 2005; my review of THE CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF KINSHIP: THE LEGACY OF DAVID M. SCHNEIDER in AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 2002; "Ideology, 'history of religions,' and hunter-gatherer studies," in THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE 1998; "The quest for purity in anthropological inquiry," in W. Shapiro and Uli Linke (eds.) DENYING BIOLOGY: ESSAYS ON GENDER AND PSEUDO-PROCREATION; "Sex, violence, and cultural constructionism," in THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE 1995; "Of 'origins and essences': Aborginal conception ideology and anthropological conceptions of Aboriginal 'local organization'," in W. Shapiro (ed) ESSAYS ON THE GENERATION AND MAINTENANCE OF THE PERSON IN HONOUR OF JOHN BARNES (special issue of THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY 1990); "Ritual kinship, ritual incorporation, and the denial of death," in MAN 1988; and "The place of cognitive extensionism in the history of anthropological thought," in THE JOURNAL OF THE POLYNESIAN SOCIETY 1982.