Jeffrey Snodgrass

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Institutional Affiliation

Colorado State University
Adjunct Professor, Colorado School of Public Health

Education

• Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of California, San Diego, California, 1997
• M.A. in Anthropology, University of California, San Diego, California, 1990
• B.S. in Molecular Biology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, 1988

Regional and Thematic Interests

Cultural anthropology

Profile

I am a psychological and biocultural anthropologist who is interested to better understand the therapeutic dimensions of religion and play. I am currently examining how involvement in spirit possession rituals and tabletop roleplaying games in diverse cultural contexts might contribute positively to well-being, via identity transformation, affect (emotion, mood, & stress) regulation, and the overall promotion of psychosocial resilience. I'm also generally interested in virtue, the good life, and happiness across cultures, with implications for developing complementary and alternative (non-biomedical) approaches to global mental health. I am especially motivated to understand how these well-being processes unfold for persons experiencing identity threats and in situations of social and environmental precarity. These topics feature centrally in my recent book, The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games (University of California Press, 2023). I specialize in research methods and pragmatically mix qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection and analysis in my ethnographic studies, sometimes turning to biomarkers to illuminate how stress manifests in the mind and body. You can read more about these approaches in my book, Systematic Methods for Analyzing Culture: A Practical Guide (Routledge, 2021). Most recently, I'm developing ethnographic methods to identify and clarify causal processes, with a 2024 PLOS ONE article on that topic, Causal Inference in Ethnographic Research., along with another one in Human Organization, Sharpening causal reasoning in applied ethnographic research.

Selected Publications

Details on my research can be found on my profiles on ResearchGate and Google Scholar.