Seth Daniel Kunin

Education

A prominent anthropologist, Kunin attained his Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University in New York and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Career

Seth Daniel Kunin has written books on religious studies, including The Logic of Incest: A Structuralist Analysis of Hebrew Mythology. Kunin looks at Hebrew mythology from a structuralist perspective, examining the structure, language, and textual themes contained in Genesis, including creation, nations, and founders. In an American Ethnologist review, Daniel Boyarin called Kunin’s opening account of structuralist theory “lucid and concise.” He added that the value of Kunin’s statement on the structuralist theory of symbolic forms “is that it demonstrates the clear relationships between structuralist theories of myth and materialist theories of ideology, thereby enabling a larger theoretical formation for the description of culture than either Marxism or structuralism alone provides.” Boyarin concluded by saying that “there is much here of significance, and all of it is stimulating.” Zev Garber wrote in Religious Studies Review that Kunin’s “holistic ethnographic attempt to understand the mix of culture, nature, and divine in Hebrew mythology suggests a promising contribution to biblical studies.”

Professor Seth Kunin has been Deputy Vice-Chancellor, International at Curtin University since 2016. In this role, he leads the University’s international activities, including strategic policy, international marketing strategy, and international partnerships.

Achievements

• Kunin has been doing ethnographic research among the crypto-Jews in New Mexico for the past thirteen years. He has published a number of books on aspects of biblical and Jewish culture from an anthropological and structuralist perspective and has written about the development of theories of religion in such works as Themes and Issues in Judaism and Religion: The Modern Theories.

Works

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  • God's Place in the World

    (The concept of sacred places, although found in all relig...)

    1998
  • We think What We Eat

    (In We Think What We Eat, Seth Kunin presents both an appr...)

    2004
  • Theories of Religion

    (The aim of this new book is to provide the student with a...)

    2006
  • Juggling Identities

    (Juggling Identities is an extensive ethnography of the cr...)

    2009
  • Religion

    (A comprehensive and approachable introduction to social s...)

    2003
  • The logic of inces 2004

Views

Kunin's research focused on the application of structuralist theory and methodology to Jewish texts and culture.

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 194
  2010