Thomas Buckley

Who is Thomas Buckley?

Thomas Buckley is an American anthropologist and Buddhist monastic best known for his long-term ethnographic research with the Yurok Indians of northern California, his early work in the anthropology of reproduction, and for his major reevaluation of the work of Alfred L. Kroeber.

He received his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1982 from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Raymond D. Fogelson.

His decades-long fieldwork with the Yuroks, beginning in 1976, culminated in his ethnographic monograph Standing Ground, published in 2002.

Harry Roberts, a Yurok-trained spiritual teacher from whom Buckley learned, adopted him as his nephew in 1971.

Buckley taught anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, for many years and at other institutions as a visiting professor. In 2011 he was ordained as a Soto Zen Buddhist priest, Jokan Zenshin, with a lay community group, Great River Zendo, in midcoast Maine.