Professor of Anthropology
Ph.D., Princeton University

Fields: Melanesia; Southeast, South, and East Asia; Economic Anthropology

Professor Damon is author of From Muyuw to the Trobriands: Transformations Along the Northern Side of the Kula Ring (1990), Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula (1989, with Roy Wagner, eds.), as well as numerous journal articles and chapters in edited volumes. His research interests and specializations include structuralism, Marxism, regional systems, world system theory; ethnobotony, historical ecology, ethnoastronomy; and social structure, kinship, exchange and hierarchy. He his moving his primary research area from Melanesia to East Asia. He has made numerous trips to China since 1991 and is on the verge of conducting formal research along the south coast of China. His graduate and undergraduate course Economic Anthropology, Anthropology 522, always incorporates materials from the Indo-Pacific-Asian regions. And his undergraduate course, Ecology and Society, deals extensively with comparisons which triangulate Australia, India and China/Japan.

Web pages:

• Department of Anthropology