J. Christopher Crocker

An initial interest in structuralism and the ethnography of "elementary societies" led me first to a year in Paris, to listen to Claude Lévi- Strauss, and then to field work among the Bororo of Brazil. The Bororo have both the full range of social and cosmological institutions characteristic of dual organizations and a complex system of shamanism. They also practice secondary interment. My comparative research on these three modes of ritual practice introduced me to the work of Victor Turner, to historical studies of witchcraft, and eventually to a concern with relations between society and ceremony in medieval Europe, especially France and England.

One ethnographic area I now find especially fascinating is the Pacific Northwest Coast, which combines all the research topics above, and which I finally managed to visit in the spring of 1994. That trip rekindled a long standing interest in "art and society" and totemism.

Finally, I have intermittently published on and studied aspects of historical re-enactments and ceremonial sites, such as Williamsburg.

Specializations

Indians of North and South America; ethnology of Europe; structural analysis of kinship; rationality and myth; shamanism; political anthropology; comparative studies of kingship and sacrifice in Africa and Meso-America.

Selected Publications

• 1992 - El hombre-mono con ojos de metal: Maneras Bororo de apodar a los otros. In De Palabra y Obra en el Nuevo Mundo, vol 1, Imagénes interétnicas. M. León-Portilla, M. Guitérrez Estévez, G. H. Gossen, and J. J. y Klor de Alva, eds. pp. 237-64. Madrid: Siglo XXI de España.
• 1985 - Vital Souls: Bororo Cosmology, Natural Symbolism, and Shamanism. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
• 1983 - Being and Essence: Totemic Representations among the Eastern Bororo. In The Power of Symbols: Masks and Masquerade in the Americas. N. Ross Crumrine and Marjorie Halpin, eds. pp. 154- 73. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
• 1979 - Selves and Alters among the Eastern Bororo. In Dialectical Societies: The Gê and Bororo of Central Brazil. David Maybury-Lewis, ed. pp. 249-300. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• 1979b - Les réflexions du soi. In L'Identité: Séminaire dirigé par Claude Lévi-Strauss. Jean-Marie Benoist, ed. pp. 157-79. Paris: Bernard Grassett.
• 1977 - My Brother the Parrot. In The Social Use of Metaphor. J. David Sapir and J. Christopher Crocker, eds. pp. 164-92. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• 1973 - Ritual and the Development of Social Structure. In The Roots of Ritual. James Shaughnessy, ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdman's Publishing Co.