Michael Lambek holds a Canada Research Chair in Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. His areas of research include spirit possession, mythopraxis, and Islam in the Western Indian Ocean; transnational expansion of ‘ancestral’ religious practice; anthropological approaches to philosophical questions, especially in ethics; and medico-religious heterodoxy in Switzerland. His books include A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion (2nd ed. 2008); Illness and Irony (edited with Paul Antze, 2003); The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar (2002); Ecology and the Sacred (edited with Ellen Messer, 2001); Tense Past (edited with Paul Antze, 1996); Human Spirits (1981); and Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery and Spirit Possession (1993).
Canada Research Chair, Social Sciences
Department of Social Sciences, UTSC
Department of Anthropology
BA (McGill) MA, PhD (Michigan), FRSC.
tel: (416) 287-7312
email: lambek@utsc.utoronto.ca
Selected publications
“Provincializing God?” in Hent de Vries, ed. Religion: Beyond a Concept (2008);
“Value and Virtue” Anthropological Theory 8(2):133-57 (2008);
“Sacrifice and the Problem of Beginning” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(1):19-38 (2007);
“Another as Oneself” in Janet Carstens, ed. Ghosts of Memory (2007);
“On Catching Up with Oneself: Learning to Know that One Means What One Does” in David Berliner and Ramon Sarró, eds. Learning Religion (2007);
“Anthropology and Religion” in Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, Philip Clayton, ed. (2006).
Books include:
A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion (2nd ed. 2008)
Illness and Irony (edited with Paul Antze, 2003)
The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar (2002)
Ecology and the Sacred (edited with Ellen Messer, 2001)
Tense Past (edited with Paul Antze, 1996)
Human Spirits (1981); Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery and Spirit Possession (1993)