Contact John Burton
Education
B.A., M.A., Ph.D., SUNY Stony Brook
"My interests and experience are reflected in courses I have offered at Connecticut College, but underlying them all is a personal fascination with language, imagination and systems of symbolic representation, as these are manifested in diverse human cultures I've come to believe that teaching is impossible: one can only try to make someone want to learn. Often, it seems, what is most important is not the answers you try to provide, but the questions you raise."
Professor of Anthropology
Director of Africana Studies
Joined Connecticut College: 1983
Specialization:
- Ethnicity and Social Change
- Interface of tradition and modernity in African social experience
- Nilotic-speaking peoples of eastern Africa
- History of anthropological thought
- Sir E.E. Evans-Pritchard
Professor Burton teaches courses on social and cultural anthropology, ethnology of Sub-Saharan Africa, anthropology of sex and gender, and a course on the relationship between natural languages and systems of symbolic classifications.
He is internationally known for his research on the Nilotic-speaking peoples of eastern Africa and is the author of A Nilotic World: The Atout Speaking Peoples of the Southern Sudan and God's Ants: A Study of Atout Religion (1987; 1981). His published work has addressed the impact of capitalism on non-market economies; traditional religious practices and beliefs; possession and healing; initiation ceremonies; changing pattern of marriage and ethnic identity; and the implications of state-sponsored genocide on indigenous peoples.
His most recent book, An Introduction to Evans-Pritchard (1992), addresses concepts and paradigms in the history of anthropological thought, focusing on the work of the late British anthropologist Sir E.E. Evans-Pritchard. His latest book is titled, Culture and the Human Body: An Anthropological Perspective.
Burton has published over fifty articles and numerous book reviews in professional journals including the Journal of Asian and African Studies of which he is co-editor. He has organized symposiums for annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association and presented his work at these and other professional meetings throughout the United States and at Oxford, where he was a graduate research student in social anthropology.
Burton worked with student researchers and his departmental colleagues to develop a new course in the anthropology department as part of a college wide effort to include under-represented perspectives in the curriculum.
Burton is the recipient of multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. Several grants have funded his research experience in pastoral Nilotic-speaking Alout in southern Sudan; archival research on British administration in the Southern Sudan from 1898-1956; and field work in St. Vincent, West Indies.
View the anthropology department site.