MICHAEL OPPITZ

Michael Oppitz was born in 1942 near Schneekoppe on the Czech-Polish border (Silesia). He grew up in Cologne and studied in Berkeley, Bonn, and Cologne; he earned his PhD in 1974 with a book on the history of structural anthropology, followed by a habilitation on cross-cousin marriage in 1986. He held visiting professorships in England, France, the United States, and was professor of anthropology at the University of Zurich and director of the Ethnographic Museum, Zurich, from 1991 until 2008, when he retired. He conducted fieldwork in the Himalayas among the Sherpa (1965), the Magar (1977–1984), the Naxi of Yunnan (1995–1996), and the Qiang of Sichuan (2000–2001). Studies on kinship, mythology, ritual, shamanism, visual anthropology, and material culture were released by various publishers; his most recent book, Morphologie der Schamanentrommel, came out in 2013. He is currently working on a study on the myth of lost writing.