Steven Rubenstein
| Steven L. Rubenstein | |
|---|---|
Steven Rubenstein in Macas, Ecuador in 1988
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| Born |
June 10, 1962 Brooklyn, New York, United States |
| Died | March 8, 2012 (aged 49) Liverpool, England, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | BA anthropology, Columbia University and BA philosophy, Jewish Theological Seminary of America (joint program, 1984) MA anthropology, Columbia University (1986) PhD anthropology, Columbia University (1995) |
| Occupation | Reader in Latin American Anthropology, University of Liverpool |
| Home town | Westbury & East Williston, NY |
| Website | Homepage, University of Liverpool |
Steven Lee Rubenstein (June 10, 1962 – March 8, 2012) was an American anthropologist. He was reader in Latin American Anthropology at the University of Liverpool, and Director of Liverpool's Research Institute of Latin American Studies.
Beginning in the 1980s, Rubenstein worked with the Shuar people of Ecuador, documenting and analyzing practices of healing, the circulation of shrunken heads, and the ways in which the Shuar reacted to colonization and increasing incorporation into Ecuadorian society. He frequently used life histories of individual Shuar people as a way to understand the political conditions facing the community. He was also known for his application of reflexive and autoethnographic methods when writing about experiences of intimacy and vulnerability in ethnographic fieldwork. In his last work, he used the psychological theory of Jacques Lacan to analyze the ways in which the Shuar use the hallucinogen Ayahuasca.
Rubenstein was the author of Alejandro Tsakimp: A Shuar Healer in the Margins of History (2002), based on his life history interviews with a Shuar shaman, and co-editor with Kathleen S. Fine-Dare of Border Crossings: Transnational Americanist Anthropology (2009). He was also a editor and administrator, under the username Slrubenstein. Since registering his account in December 2001 he made more than 30,000 edits to articles about anthropology and related fields.
Rubenstein was born in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from The Wheatley School in Old Westbury, New York in 1980. He received BA degrees in anthropology from Columbia University and in philosophy from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, both in 1984 as part of a joint program, and an MA in anthropology from Columbia in 1986. He obtained his PhD in anthropology in 1995, also from Columbia, where he studied with Michael Taussig, Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, Robert Murphy and Libbet Crandon-Malamud. The title of his thesis was "Death in a Distant Place: The Politics of Shuar Shamans of the Ecuadorian Amazon," based on fieldwork in the Morona-Santiago Province in Ecuador between 1988 and 1992. His approach to studying the indigenous cultures of South America was highly influenced by Taussig's work.
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