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EMORY UNIVERSITY'S GREAT TEACHERS LECTURE March 13, 2003
There's No Place Like Home: An Anthropologist Looks at the American Family What happens when an anthropologist turns from studying exotic places to look in the mirror and study American families? Emory University anthropologist Bradd Shore has taken the tools that made him an expert on Samoan and Polynesian societies and applied them to studying American families. He discovered some surprising things about the special place of rituals and celebrations in the American middle-class family. Shore will talk about his current research on family ritual and what it tells us about why, for Americans, "there's no place like home." In the next Emory Great Teachers Lecture Series, Shore will discuss "There's No Place Like Home: An Anthropologist Looks at the American Family." Shore is the Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology and serves as director of Emory's Center on Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL). A cultural anthropologist, he is a leading authority on Samoan culture and the study of Polynesian societies. His research approach is interdisciplinary, combining tools from cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, ethics and literature. He is the only anthropologist ever to be invited to give the Heinz Werner Lectures in Psychology at Clark University (Mass.). An award-winning teacher, Shore has been a member of the Emory faculty since 1982. Among his many course offerings at Emory is an unusual class co-listed in the English and anthropology departments called "Ritual in Shakespeare." He previously was on the faculty at the University of California at Santa Cruz and at Sarah Lawrence College.
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