Anthropologist and author Joel Robbins presents “Beyond the Suffering Slot: Toward an Anthropology of the Good” on Thursday, April 7, at 7:00 p.m., in Scripps College’s Vita Nova 100. This event is free and open to the public.
Robbins is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. Trained in symbolic, semiotic, and structural anthropology, Robbins has carried out research focused on Christianity and cultural change among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea. For the last several years Robbins has conducted research on the social and cultural processes that have shaped the rapid globalization of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. He has also helped to lay the theoretical groundwork for the developing field of the anthropology of Christianity and has worked to advance our theoretical understanding of cultural change, and particularly of processes of radical cultural change that have rarely been adequately theorized within anthropology.
His first book, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (2004), received the J. I. Staley Prize from the School of American Research. Robbins has articles in various publications, including, Anthropological Quarterly, Social Analysis, Current Anthropology, and South Atlantic Quarterly. He is co-editor of the journal Anthropological Theory and editor of the University of California Press book series “The Anthropology of Christianity.”
For more information please contact the Scripps College department of anthropology at (909) 607-3250.