Bruce Kapferer

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Bruce Kapferer (born June 4, 1940 in Sydney , Australia ) is an Australian social anthropologist and sociologist .

Life

Bruce Kapferer studied (as a student of Raymond Firth , Mervyn Meggitt and Chandra Jayawardena , later then Max Gluckman ) Social Anthropology at the University of Sydney (BA 1963), 1963-66 at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Lusaka (Zambia) and at the university Manchester (there Senior Lecturer 1966–73, Ph.D. 1969) and was Professor at the University of Adelaide ( South Australia , Australia, 1973–85), at University College London (1985–96), at James Cook University(Australia, 1996–99) and since 1999 at the University of Bergen (Norway). He has also been visiting professor in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Jerusalem and the USA.

He has been married to the Australian urban and cultural sociologist Judith Kapferer since 1963 .

Fields of work

He mainly works on rituals and symbolic action, ethnicity and violence , urban , state and administrative sociology , NGOs and general theoretical questions in the subject and was a field researcher in Zambia (on the ethnology of Bisa and industrial sociology in Kabwe ), South Asia ( Sri Lanka , Kerala / India ), South Africa and Australia .

Publications

  • Strategy and Transaction in an African Factory , Manchester: Manchester University Press 1972 (investigation in Kabwe )
  • (with Berg): A Celebration of Demons , Indiana University Press 1991
  • The Feast of the Sorcerer , Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1997
  • Legends of People, Myths of State , Smithsonian Institution Press 1998
  • "The Sorcery of Consciousness : A Sinhala Discourse on the Dynamics of Consciousness", in: Journal of Communication and Cognition , 2000, Vol. 33, H. 1/2
  • "Sexuality and the Art of Seduction in Singhalese Exorcism ", in: Ethnos , 2000, vol. 65, no. 1
  • "Starwars. About Anthropology, Culture and Globalization ", in: Australian Journal of Anthropology , 2000
  • "Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Culture of the State. The 17th Edvard Westermarck Memorial Lecture ". Suomen Anthropologi , 2002, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 4-23
  • (Ed.) Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic , Witchcraft and Sorcery. New York / Oxford: Berghahn Books 2003
    • (therein :) Introduction: Outside All Reason - Magic, Sorcery and Epistemology in Anthropology
  • (Ed.) The Retreat of the Social: The Rise and RISE of Reductionism , New York / Oxford: Berghahn Books 2005

See also

personal data
SURNAME Kapferer, Bruce
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian social anthropologist and sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 4th 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Sydney , Australia