Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions.
Sidney Wilfred Mintz was an American anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food. Mintz received his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and conducted his primary fieldwork among sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico. Later expanding his ethnographic research to Haiti and Jamaica, he produced historical and ethnographic studies of slavery and global capitalism, cultural hybridity, Caribbean peasants, and the political economy of food commodities. He taught for two decades at Yale University before helping to found the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he remained for the duration of his career. Mintz's history of sugar, Sweetness and Power, is considered one of the most influential publications in cultural anthropology and food studies.
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes. Each school within psychological anthropology has its own approach.
Nadia Abu El-Haj is an American academic with a PhD in anthropology from Duke University. She is a professor of anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society is a 2001 book by Nadia Abu El Haj based on her doctoral thesis for Duke University. The book has been praised by some scholars and criticised by others.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is an anthropologist, educator and author. She is the Chancellor’s Professor Emerita of Anthropology and the director and co-founder of the PhD program in Critical Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her writing on the anthropology of the body, hunger, illness, medicine, motherhood, psychiatry, psychosis, social suffering, violence and genocide, death squads, and human trafficking.
Helena Wulff is professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University. Her research is in the anthropology of communication and aesthetics based on a wide range of studies of the social worlds of literary production, dance, and the visual arts.
Richard Price is an American anthropologist and historian, best known for his studies of the Caribbean and his experiments with writing ethnography.
Sally Price, born Sally Hamlin in Boston, is an American anthropologist, best known for her studies of so-called "primitive art" and its place in the imaginaire of Western viewers.
Setha M. Low is a former president of the American Anthropological Association, a professor in environmental psychology, and the director of the Public Space Research Group at the City University of New York. Low also served as a Conservation Guest Scholar at the Getty Conservation Institute.
Smadar Lavie is a Mizrahi U.S.-Israeli anthropologist, author, and activist. She specializes in the anthropology of Egypt, Israel and Palestine, emphasizing issues of race, gender and religion. Lavie is a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and a visiting scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Lavie received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1989) and spent nine years as assistant and associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She authored The Poetics of Military Occupation, receiving the 1990 Honorable Mention of the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing, and Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture receiving the 2015 Honorable Mention of the Association of Middle East Women's Studies Book Award Competition. Wrapped in the Flag of Israel's first edition was also one of the four finalists in the 2015 Clifford Geertz Book Award Competition of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. She also co-edited Creativity/Anthropology and Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Lavie won the American Studies Association's 2009 Gloria Anzaldúa Prize for her article, “Staying Put: Crossing the Palestine-Israel Border with Gloria Anzaldúa,” published in Anthropology and Humanism (2011). In 2013, Smadar Lavie won the “Heart at East” Honor Plaque for lifetime service to Mizraḥi communities in Israel-Palestine.
Dance research is the study of dance, including dance history, ethnochoreology, dance theory, dance anthropology, and dance science.
Elizabeth Mertz is a linguistic and legal anthropologist who is also a law professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she teaches family law courses. She has been on the research faculty of the American Bar Foundation since 1989. She has a PhD in Anthropology from Duke University and a JD from Northwestern University. Her early research focused on language, identity and politics in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and her dissertation dealt with language shift in Cape Breton Scottish Gaelic, drawing on semiotic anthropology. Her later research examines the language of U.S. legal education in detail using linguistic anthropological approaches. She writes on semiotics, anthropology, and law, among other topics. She has been editor of Law & Social Inquiry and of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.
Sarah J. Mahler is an American author and cultural anthropologist. She was part of a group of anthropologists attempting to change migration studies to a more comprehensive way to understand how migrants crossing international borders remain tied to their homelands and how cultural practices and identities reflect influences from past and present contexts, called "transnational migration."
R. S. Khare is a socio-cultural anthropologist and a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, U.S. He is known for studying “from within/without” India's changing society, religions, food systems, and political cultures, and for following the trajectories of contemporary Indian traditional and modern cultural discourses. His anthropology has endeavored to widen reasoned bridges across the India-West cultural, religious-philosophical, and literary distinctions and differences.
Alexander Lesser (1902–1982) was an American anthropologist. Working in the Boasian tradition of American Cultural Anthropology, he adopted critical stances of several ideas of his fellow Boasians, and became known as an original and critical thinker, pioneering several ideas that later became widely accepted within anthropology.
Alisse Waterston is an American professor of anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Her work focuses on how systemic violence and inequality influence society.
Magdalena Śniadecka-Kotarska is the Polish Ambassador to Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. She is an ethnologist/anthropologist of culture and politics, the first Polish Latin Americanist, conducting field research in Andean America devoted to ethnopolitics, native populations and gender identity.
Jacqueline Knörr is a German anthropologist. She is Head of a Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Extraordinary Professor at the Martin Luther University in Halle/Saale, Germany. She also works as (political) advisor, consultant, and expert witness in the fields of asylum procedures, human rights issues and (re-)migration and (re-)integration.
Naomi Robin Quinn was a major figure in cognitive anthropology, with contributions to research methods and cultural models, particularly applied to topics such as American models of marriage and relationships and to child-rearing cross-culturally.
