Frederick H. Damon is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology from the University of Virginia where he taught from 1976-77 academic year to May, 2022. He earned his BA in Psychology at Duke University (1970) and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University (1978). Since 1973 he has spent more than 4 years on Muyuw Island, eastern Papua New Guinea, and since 1991 more than year in Taiwan and China (PRC), mostly around Quanzhou, Fujian Province. He writes about ritual, exchange and production systems, ethnobotany, and calendrical systems. Added to his original backgrounds in the structuralism, European Marxism and world-systems theories developed in the 1960s and 1970s are the historical ecologies birthed in the United States and Australia after 1980. He will conclude his academic endeavors detailing a comparative study on astronomies and cosmologies extending from East Asia to the South Pacific, and, perhaps, a study of Northwest Coast societies from North America. During the fall of 2023 he is lecturing in London, Beijing, Hangzhou, Quanzhou, Guangzhou, Singapore and returning for a short visit to his original research site, effectively his second home, Muyuw, in the northeast corner of the Kula Ring in Papua New Guinea.
Frederick Damon, ANT '78 PhD
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