Erik Mueggler

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Plant collectors working for the British botanist George Forrest, near Lijiang, China, cerca 1910.
(courtesy of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh)

Erik Mueggler grew up in Montana and Utah. He attended Deep Springs College and Cornell University, where he graduated with a B.A. in socio-cultural anthropology. After several years working as a carpenter, cowboy, packer, teacher, security guard, and bicycle messenger, he attended the Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a Ph.D. in anthropology. He is currently Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. In addition, he is affiliated with the University of Michigan's Center for Chinese Studies, Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History, and Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life.

Mueggler's work covers a variety of topics in social and cultural theory, focusing in particular on the politics of ritual, religion, science, and nature in the border regions of China.

Mueggler carried out two years of field research in Yunnan Province, China for his first book, The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence and Place in Southwest China (2001). This book explores the history of a minority community in Yunnan province in the last half of the twentieth century. The book shows how rural mountian people used resources of language and ritual to create a habitable place for themselves in the face of many, sometimes devastating, projects to bring modernity to them.

Mueggler's more recent work examines the history of British botanical exploration in China's southwest borderlands. In the first half of the twentieth century, British botanists undertook an intensive exploration of this vast region, where Burma, Tibet, and China meet.. They collected and named thousands of new species, shipped tens of thousands of specimens back to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Edinburgh and Kew, and introduced hundreds into cultivation in British gardens. By focusing on the relations of these explorers to the mountain inhabitants who worked as their guides, porters, and collectors, Mueggler explores this region as a place of multiple, experimental encounters amongst the world's human and nonhuman inhabitants.

Mueggler is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including, most recently, a Center for the Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship, a British Academy Fellowship, and a Macarthur Foundation Fellowship.

Department of Anthropology | Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History | Center for Chinese Studies | Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life

last update: 5/5/06