My Biography
Robert Jarvenpa is Professor Emeritus and former chair of the Department of Anthropology at University at Albany, SUNY, and is a research associate at the New York State Museum. He received a PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1975. As an ecologically-oriented social anthropologist and ethnoarchaeologist he has conducted numerous field research projects in Alaska, Canada, Finland, western Siberia, and Central America. Much of his scholarship has focused on hunter-gatherer subsistence and sociospatial organization, agrarian ecology and decision making, economic change and interethnic relations, and gender dynamics. He has worked with and written extensively about the Chipewyan (Denesoline) of the English River First Nation with whom he has enjoyed a nearly fifty-year relationship. His most recent book, “Declared Defectve: Native American, Eugenics, and the Myth of Nam Hollow,” (2018, University of Nebraska Press) is an anthropological history of an outcast community and the eugenics profession.