Andrew Buckser

Professor of Anthropology Office: STON 314
Office Phone: (765) 496-2857
Email: buckser@purdue.edu

Specialization:

Anthropology of religion, medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, anthropology of modernity, anthropology of Europe, Scandinavia

Courses: Taught (Last two years)

ANTH 205, Human Cultural Diversity.
ANTH 341/Sociology 341, Culture and Personality
ANTH 473, Religion in Culture and Society
ANTH 506, Development of Modern Anthropology

Andrew Buckser is a cultural anthropologist who studies the effects of social change on religious systems and on understandings of illness. He has conducted much of his research in Denmark, where he has done fieldwork with a variety of religious groups. His first study, in the early 1990s, explored the development of several Protestant sects in rural Jutland. Subsequently he worked with members of the Jewish community in Copenhagen, investigating changes in the Jewish experience there over the course of the twentieth century. His recent work has turned to Indiana, where he conducts fieldwork and interviews among people with the neurological disorder known as Tourette Syndrome. In each of these settings, he has asked how changing cultural systems shape notions of self, and conversely, how individual struggles for self-identity influence the development of larger cultural models. This work has been published in a variety of journals in anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and ethnic studies. Dr. Buckser has also published three books on his research: Communities of Faith: Sectarianism, Identity, and Social Change on a Danish Island (Berghahn 1996); After the Rescue: Jewish Identity and Community in Contemporary Denmark (Palgrave Macmillan 2003); and The Anthropology of Religious Conversion (Rowman and Littlefield 2003), edited with Stephen Glazier.

Dr. Buckser received his B.A. in anthropology from Harvard in 1986, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. He helped found the Society for the Anthropology of Religion in 1997; he currently serves on its board, and is chair of the Clifford Geertz Book Prize in the Anthropology of Religion. He served as Chair of Anthropology from 2005 to 2008, and is currently Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Positions at Purdue University

2001 – present Associate Professor of Anthropology
1995 – 2001 Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Service to the Profession

Executive Board, Society for the Anthropology of Religion, 2005

Treasurer, Society for the Anthropology of Religion, 1997-2004.

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