Background

Steven Parish was born on November 29, 1953 in Lacrosse, Washington, United States. He is the son of Lyle D. Parish, a farmer and factory worker, and Alice Parish, a nurse.

Education

Parish was educated at the University of Oregon, receiving a bachelor's degree from it in 1978. He studied also at the University of California in San Diego, he got master's degree from it in 1981, as well as philosophy's degree in 1987.

Career

Parish worked as an assistant professor of anthropology at Boston University during five years from 1988. A year later he became an independent scholar and consultant, holding that position for 2 years. From 1996 he served as an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California.

Professor Steve Parish is a member of the Psychological/Medical Anthropology subfield. His major interests are cultural, medical, and psychological anthropology, social theory, religion, the self and subjectivity, global health and the subjectivity of suffering, climate change and its consequences for society and human values. His research has addressed a number of topics in psychological anthropology, with a central focus on the study of self, emotion, and moral experience.

His research has used person-centered ethnography to understand the role of culture in the development of moral consciousness, to examine the experience of inequality as it shapes the formation of self and culture in caste society, and to explore the subjectivity of suffering.

He has a strong interest in the intersection of global health, climate change, and sustainability—especially in India, Nepal, and the Himalaya. This reflects interests in nature, culture, and the ethics of humanity’s relationship to the natural world and cultural diversity.

Works

Works Gallery

• book

  • Selves in Time and Place

    (Recently anthropology has turned to accounts of persons-i...)

  • Subjectivity and Suffering in American Culture: Possible Selves (Culture, Mind and Society)

    (Winner of The Boyer Prize from the Society for Psychologi...)

  • Hidden History of the Boston Irish: Little-Known Stories from Ireland's "Next Parish Over"

    (When it comes to Irish America, certain names spring to m...)

    2008
  • Hierarchy and Its Discontents: Culture and the Politics of Consciousness in Caste Society

    (The caste system fascinates Western scholars because it f...)

    1996
  • Moral Knowing in a Hindu Sacred City 1994

Religion

In the anthropology of religion and South Asian studies, Parish's scholarly interests include Hinduism, Buddhism, and the role of ritual in selfhood and social life.

Views

Quotations: “As a Writer and ethnographer, I explore lived cultural worlds. My first book is a study of self in culture, an exploration of a moral world and its cultural psychology. My second book is about untouchables in the caste system of Nepal and India; it attempts to bring to light their psychological struggles and the cultural politics of their consciousness."

“Trying to do a little justice to this very human process means writing against powerful intellectual currents that reduce persons to social constructions, render them flat, one-dimensional discourses, or even reduce them to empty, passive ‘sites’ for such discourse. This obscures the pain and dynamics of being human in any culture, obscures human agency and people’s efforts to make lives for themselves. As James Baldwin reminded us, evading the complexity of others diminishes us all: for the complexity of others resonates with “the disquieting complexity of ourselves.” Along with others, I have tried to write a more robust sense of the person into contemporary anthropology and social theory."

“I believe those of us who struggle to understand society, culture, and history should not ignore those who struggle to live in society and culture, who confront history with their lives. Social theorist C. Wright Mills wrote that we must locate society into the flow of history, and human lives in society. We need to ask about the experience and identity of people, to explore their quandaries and lives and selves. Such questions guide my work and writing."

“What I write is ethnography. That is, I try to describe and say something meaningful about cultural worlds and the lives of those who inhabit those worlds. In the contemporary scene, ethnography has emerged as an important and controversial genre of writing—one centrally involved in debates about society. Yet I believe it has yet to develop fully its potential for illuminating the cultural and psychological life of persons-in-society."

Membership

Parish is a member of American Anthropological Association and Society for Psychological Anthropology.

Connections

Parish married Rita Shakya in 1985.

father:

Lyle D. Parish

mother:

Alice Parish

wife:

Rita Shakya