Bruce M. Knauft is Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, Atlanta. Author of eight books and numerous articles and chapters, Dr. Knauft has special interest in cultural diversity both globally and closer to home. This includes the social, cultural, and psychological construction of power, identity, and personhood in relation to inequality and discrimination or stigma, including in areas of gender, ethnicity, race, religion, nationality, and class.
Dr. Knauft conducted his original ethnographic fieldwork—on shamanism, spirituality, and sorcery—among the remote Gebusi people of the rainforest of Papua New Guinea’s Western Province, where he continues to do fieldwork. He has also conducted engaged intellectual and activist project work concerning post-conflict developments (supported by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation) in a dozen developing countries of east and west Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Altai-Himalayas.
During the past decade, Dr. Knauft has developed increasing interest, as both a scholar and a practitioner, in Tibetan Buddhism, meditation, and mindfulness—both in Himalayan countries and in dharma centers in the U.S. and Canada. He also continues scholarship in areas of general anthropology, including theoretical developments concerning political economy, culture, and subjectivity. His most recent articles consider issues in Tibetan Buddhist tantra and current political developments in the U.S. His most recent books are “Mongolians After Socialism: Politics, Economy, Religion” (Co-edited, 2012) and “The Gebusi: Lives Transformed in a Rainforest World” (2016).
