The Craft of Anthropology. Doing Fieldwork with Artisans in Thailand and Greece in Times of Change

Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. He is also the former and founding Director (2014-18) of the Thai Studies Program, Asia Center, Harvard University; Senior Advisor on Critical Heritage Studies to the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, and Visiting Professor at Leiden University. He is also Chiang Jang Scholar and Visiting Professor at Shanghai International University, and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Arts, Melbourne University. His research interests cover social theory, history of anthropology, social poetics, knowledge politics, politics of history and heritage, crypto-colonialism, artisanship, and the practice of comparison, and is ethnographically focused on Europe (especially Greece & Italy) and Southeast Asia (specifically Thailand). He is the author of eleven books (most recently Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok, 2016) and Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Institutions, and Societies, 2016), and is the producer of two films about Rome and currently working on two films about Bangkok. Herzfeld was Lewis Henry Morgan Lecturer for 2018 with a topic focusing on “subversive archaism” in Greece and Thailand; the book version will appear in 2021 as Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage (Duke University Press). A former editor of American Ethnologist, editor at large (responsible for “Polyglot Perspectives”) for Anthropological Quarterly, co-editor of the “New Anthropologies of Europe: Perspectives and Provocations” series at Berghahn Books and of the IIAS Asian Heritages series at Amsterdam University Press, he holds honorary degrees from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki), and the University of Crete, and is a past winner of the J.I. Staley Prize, the J.B. Donne Prize in the Anthropology of Art, and the Rivers Memorial Medal.