Professor William Balee

William Balee is Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University. He has taught cultural anthropology at Tulane since 1991. Before that, he taught cultural anthropology at the State University of New York-Purchase College, City University of New York-Hunter College, City University of New York-Queensborough Community College, and the State University of New Jersey-Rutgers at Newark. He received the M.A. (1979), M.Phil. (1980), and Ph.D. (1984) degrees in anthropology from Columbia University....See more

William Balee is Professor of Anthropology at Tulane University. He has taught cultural anthropology at Tulane since 1991. Before that, he taught cultural anthropology at the State University of New York-Purchase College, City University of New York-Hunter College, City University of New York-Queensborough Community College, and the State University of New Jersey-Rutgers at Newark. He received the M.A. (1979), M.Phil. (1980), and Ph.D. (1984) degrees in anthropology from Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation was based on fieldwork he carried out among the Tupi-speaking Ka'apor Indians of the eastern Brazilian Amazon. He has continued to do fieldwork among the Ka'apor ever since, as well as among other indigenous lowland South American societies elsewhere in Brazil and in the tropical and subtropical forest regions of Bolivia and Argentina. He is the author of Footprints of the Forest: Ka'apor Ethnobotany the Historical Ecology of Plant Utilization by an Amazonian People (1994), which won the Mary Klinger Award from the Society for Economic Botany. His other books include Resource Management in Amazonia: Indigenous and Folk Strategies (co-edited with D.A. Posey, 1989), Advances in Historical Ecology (edited, 1998), and Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology: Studies in the Neotropical Lowlands (co-edited with C.L. Erickson, 2006). He coedits the New Frontiers in Historical Ecology Series for Left Coast." See less