Provides a vivid picture of the engagements between the actors who together contributed to transforming Tlingit culture: the different Tlingit families, the Russian traders, Orthodox and Presbyterian missionaries, Russian and U.
S. settlers, and Tlingit women and men,
I was born in the USSR inand attended public school there as well as studied for three years at the History Department of Moscow State University.
I immigrated to the United States with my family inand completed my undergraduate education at Boston University in, majoring in anthropology and religion.
At BU I had the pleasure of studying with two brilliant anthropologists: Dennis Tedlock and Eva Hunt, I then pursued my doctorate in anthropology at the University of Chicago inwhere I was fortunate to study with such outstanding scholars as George W.
Stocking, Jr. , Raymon D. Fogelson, Paul Friedrich, Nancy Munn, John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, After receiving my Ph. D. inI taught in the Anthropology Department of the University of Michigan Ann Arbor betweenand, In the fall ofI began my career as Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College and have been there ever since, My anthropological and ethnohistorical research has ranged from the culture and history of the Tlingit people of Alaska, anthropology of death and dying, anthropology of religion, photography and Native Alaskans, Russian Native relations in Alaska, and the history of anthropology.
As far as the last topic is concerned, I am particularly interested in the history of Russian anthropology of the late imperial and early soviet eras as well as the history of American anthropology of the lateth and the first half of theth century.
Currently I am researching an intellectual biography of Paul Radin, one of Franz Boass most brilliant students and a
major figure in US anthropology of that era.