Anthropology 3 Instructor Information

About: Professor Jason Throop

Professor Jason Throop

My research and teaching interests are clearly situated at the intersection of the fields of medical and psychological anthropology. Broadly configured, my research agenda sets out to examine human existence as articulated in its cultural, moral, and practical dimensions. Committed to furthering a phenomenological anthropological approach to understanding our distinctly human ways of being-in-the world, my contributions tomedical and psychological anthropology span a fairly broad spectrum of theoretical and practical concerns. These include: theoretical and ethnographic work on empathy and intersubjectivity; investigations into the problems of experience in contemporary anthropological theory; explorations of the cultural patterning of pain, sensation, emotion, and mood; analyses of social suffering and illness experience; studies of agency and will in cultural context; as well as ongoing research on the existential and cultural processes underlying the formation of ethical modes of being. My regional specialization is Oceania where I have conducted over 20 months of research on experiences of pain, suffering, illness, and morality on the island of Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia.

I have authored one book, Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap (2010, University of California Press), and co-edited two others, Toward an Anthropology of the Will (2010, Stanford University Press) and The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies (2011, Berghahn Press). I am currently developing a new empirical project on aging and climate change on Vancouver Island, Canada.

Contact Information

Email: jthroop@ucla.edu

How to reach me: by email.

Office Hours

Mondays 10am-Noon

Haines 388