Paul Shankman (Ph.D., Harvard, 1973; Professor)
Paul Shankman is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in Samoa, Polynesia, ecological anthropology, political anthropology, and theory. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1973 and has been a faculty member at the University of Colorado-Boulder since then. He has conducted fieldwork in Samoa since 1966 and has also worked with Pacific Islanders in the United States. For the past fifteen years, he has been involved in the Mead-Freeman controversy and has written a number of articles on it. His new book on the controversy, Trashing Margaret Mead, will be published in October 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. He is currently involved in research on global warming in the South Pacific. |
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Selected Publications:
- Forthcoming October 2009. Trashing Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy. University of Wisconsin Press.
- 2006. Virginity and Veracity: Re-reading Historical Sources in the Mead-Freeman Controversy. Ethnohistory 53 (3):478-505.
- 2005. Margaret Mead's Other Samoa: Re-reading Social Organization of Manu'a. Pacific Studies 28 (3/4):46-59.
- 2004. South Seas Confidential: The Politics of Interethnic Relationships in Colonial Samoa. In Victoria Lockwood, editor, Globalization and Culture Change in the Pacific Islands. Upper Saddle River: NJ, Pearson Prentice Hall. pp. 377-89.
- 2001. Interethnic Unions and the Regulation of Sex in Colonial Samoa,1830-1945. Journal of the Polynesian Society 110 (2):119-147.
- 2000. Culture, Biology and Evolution: The Mead-Freeman Controversy Revisited. Journal of Youth and Adolescence 29(5): 539-556.
- 2000. "The "Exotic" and the "Domestic": Regions and Representation in Cultural Anthropology." Human Organization 50(3):289-299, (first author with Tracy B. Ehlers).
- 1999. Development, Sustainability, and the Deforestation of Samoa. Pacific Studies 22(3&4):167-188.
- 1996. The History of Sexual Conduct in Samoa and the Mead/Freeman Controversy. American Anthropologist 98(3): 555-567.
- 1991. Culture Contact, Ecology, and Dani Warfare. Man
26(2): 299-321.