Thomas Buckley is an American anthropologist and Buddhist monastic best known for his long-term ethnographic research with the Yurok Indians of northern California , his early work in the anthropology of reproduction , and for his major reevaluation of the work of Alfred L. Kroeber

Alfred L. Kroeber

Alfred Louis Kroeber was an American anthropologist. He was the first professor appointed to the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and played an integral role in the early days of its Museum of Anthropology, where he served as director from 1909 through...

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He received his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1982 from the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

, where he studied under Raymond D. Fogelson

Raymond D. Fogelson

Raymond D. Fogelson is an American anthropologist known for his research on American Indians of the southeastern United States, especially the Cherokee. He is considered a founder of the subdiscipline of ethnohistory....

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His decades-long fieldwork with the Yuroks, beginning in 1976 (following upon Buddhist training in California under Shunryu Suzuki, 1965–71), culminated in his ethnographic monograph Standing Ground, published in 2002. (For this publication he had an honorable mention in the Victor Turner Prize award by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology)

Harry Roberts (1906–81), a Yurok-trained spiritual teacher from whom Buckley learned, adopted him as his nephew in 1971.

Buckley taught anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston

University of Massachusetts Boston

The University of Massachusetts Boston, also known as UMass Boston, is an urban public research university and the second largest campus in the five-campus University of Massachusetts system. The university is located on on Harbor Point in the City of Boston, Massachusetts, United States...

, for many years and at other institutions as a visiting professor. In 2011 he was ordained as a Soto Zen Buddhist priest, Jokan Zenshin, with a lay community group, Great River Zendo, in midcoast Maine.

Selected works

• (1982) "Menstruation and the power of Yurok women: Methods in cultural reconstruction." American Ethnologist 9(1): 47-60.

• (1984) "Yurok speech registers and ontology." Language in Society 13(4): 467-88.

• (1984) "Living in the distance." Parabola 9(3):64-79.

• (1988) (ed., with Alma Gottlieb) Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

• (1996) "The pitiful history of little events": The epistemological and moral contexts of Kroeber's Californian ethnology, 1900-1915. In, Stocking, George W., Jr., ed., History of Anthropology, Vol. 8: Volkengeist as Method and Ethics: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 257–297.

• (2002) Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850-1990. Berkeley: University of California Press.

• (2003) Dancing with Davey, A Sailor's Tale(poems). Newport News, VA: MariahBooks.