 from Yale University in 1968 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1976.He spent the 1982–83 academic year at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where he came up with the idea for "Anthropology as Cultural Critique", which he co-wrote with Michael M. J. Fischer and published in 1986 (a second edition was later published in 1999).Afterwards, he served as the Joseph D. Jamail Professor at Rice University, where he chaired the anthropology department for 25 years.