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A cultural anthropologist whose principal interests are in anthropological theory, religion and mental health, embodiment, language and culture, and cultural phenomenology,
Thomas J. Csordas is a professor of anthropology and religion at Case Western Reserve University where he chairs the anthropology department. He graduated from Ohio State University, took his Ph.D. at Duke University in 1980, and subsequently studied psychiatric anthropology at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Csordas taught at Duke, Vance-Granville Community College in Henderson, North Carolina, and the University of North Carolina before joining the Harvard medical faculty in 1986 as an instructor in medical anthropology. He was an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in 1989-90, then accepted an appointment at Case Western as an associate professor. He was promoted to professor of anthropology six years later. In 2000, he was granted a secondary appointment as professor of religion. His research has been with charismatic Catholics and members of the Navajo nation on topics including therapeutic process, ritual language, imagery, the self, techniques of the body, and causal reasoning about illness. His work has been recognized with the Stirling Award for Contributions in Psychological Anthropology, in addition to grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Center for American Indian and Native Alaskan Mental Health Research, the Milton Fund, the W. B. Arnold Pain Treatment and Research Center, and the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Csordas also is the recipient of Case Western’s John S. Diekhoff Award for Distinguished Graduate Teaching. He has served as president of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion and as editor of Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. In addition to publishing more than thirty journal articles and book chapters, he is the editor of Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (1994) and guest editor of Ritual Healing and Navajo Society (2000), a special issue of the Medical Anthropology Quarterly. His books include The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (1994), Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement (1997), and Body/Meaning/Healing, which was published last year by Palgrave. Dr. Csordas is working on a new book tentatively entitled “Navajo People, Navajo Healing.”
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