Philip Carl Salzman received his B.A from Antioch College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and he served as Professor of Anthropology at McGill University from 1968 to 2018.
He founded the Commission on Nomadic Peoples of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, and its international journal, Nomadic Peoples, for which he received the IUAES Gold Award. In recent years, he has been a Senior Fellow at the University of St. Andrews, an Open Society International Scholar at the American University of Central Asia, an Erasmus Mundus International Fellow at the University of Catania, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has engaged in extensive ethnographic field research in Baluchistan (Iran), Gujarat and Rajasthan (India), and Sardinia (Italy) which has provided the foundation for many articles in academic journals, and for books such as The Anthropology of Real Life: Events in Human Experience (1999), Black Tents of Baluchistan (2000) (winner of the Premio PitrP–Salomone Marino Award), Understanding Culture: An Introduction of Anthropological Theory (2001), Pastoralists: Equality, Hierarchy, and the State (2004), Culture and Conflict in the Middle East (2008), Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict (2008), and Thinking Anthropologically 3rd Ed, (2010). His latest book is Classic Comparative Anthropology: Studies from the Tradition (2012). In public affairs, he was a member of Middle East Strategy at Harvard (2008-2010), a member of the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (2004-2012), and is currently a member of the Academic Council of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Studies, a Fellow of the Middle East Forum (2015-), and the President of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (2016-). He has published articles and reports in the Middle East Forum, Gatestone Institute, the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, and the Macdonald Laurier Institute.
Throughout my childhood, my mother had nightmares that the Nazis were coming for her. In Europe my co-ethnics lived that nightmare. From the time that the Romans invaded and colonized the holy land, finally defeated the Jewish resistance, and expelled most remaining Jews, many Jews have lived as [...]
Identity politics demands the reduction of individual identity to collective census category identities. You are no longer an individual person with hopes and fears, talents and abilities, and motivations and opinions. The most important thing about you is your sex, or your race, or your sexuality, or your [...]
