Biographical Sketch of Jim Peoples

James Peoples

Professor of Anthropology

Director, East Asian Studies

B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1970
Ph.D., University of California, 1977

Dr. Peoples in a Korean restaurant with the students in his “Peoples and Cultures of the Pacific” class, fall semester,  2006.

Professor Peoples came to Ohio Wesleyan in 1988, having previously taught in the anthropology departments of the University of California, Davis, and the University of Tulsa. His main anthropological fieldwork was on Kosrae, a small island in the Federated States of Micronesia, where he studied the impact of American subsidies on the island’s agricultural and cash economy. Dr. Peoples' first book, Island in Trust, published in 1985, summarized the results of this field research. He is the co-author of Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, a textbook now in its eighth edition. He also co-authored Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, published in 1999 and Essentials of Cultural Anthropology, published in 2002. He has written numerous articles for professional journals and scholarly monographs, most recently in 2007. His recent research is a large-scale, comparative analysis of political evolution on over twenty Micronesian islands. Within social/cultural anthropology his research are in interactions between humans and the natural environment, peoples of Oceania, East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan), and cultural evolution.

Since 2002, Dr. Peoples has served as Director of East Asian Studies, an interdisciplinary major at Ohio Wesleyan.  In recent years, he has journeyed to South Korea and Japan, attending faculty development seminars and learning from site visits.  Most of his future work will be in East Asia.

To view the Appendix "The Internet and Anthropology" from Dr. Peoples' book, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, click here.

Courses taught at Ohio Wesleyan: Cultural Anthropology; Prehistory of North America; Human Ecology; Peoples and Cultures of the Pacific; Cultures of East Asia; Native American Cultures of the Southwest; Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion; Problems in Prehistory; Perspectives on World Hunger; Families: Evolution and Cultures; Cultural and Social Change