John W. Traphagan

Interests

Biography

John Traphagan is Associate Professor of Religious Studies.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in Anthropology, holds an MAR degree from Yale Divinity School, and a BA in political science from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.  His postdoctoral research was conducted as a National Institute on Aging Postdoctoral Fellow at the Population Studies Center of the University of Michigan.  He has received a variety of grants to support his research, including grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Social Science Research Council, the Association for Asian Studies, and the American Philosophical Society.  He was also a Fulbright scholar to Japan.  His research interests revolve round three primary areas: religion and society in Japan, medical ethics and medical anthropology, and anthropological approaches to religion. 

Prof. Traphagan is the author of Taming Oblivion: Aging Bodies and the Fear of Senility in Japan (2000) and The Practice of Concern: Ritual, Well-Being, and Aging in Rural Japan (2004).  In addition, he has edited and co-edited a number of books on similar topics.  His most recent edited volume, Imagined Families, Lived Families: Culture and Kinship in Contemporary Japan (with Akiko Hashimoto, 2008), explores the cultural and demographic transformations affecting the modern Japanese family from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.  Prof. Traphagan has also given a number of public talks on various topics in religion and anthropology, including a November, 2008 lecture at the SETI Institute entitled “Some Thoughts from an Anthropologist on Culture, Interstellar Communication, and the Construction of Interstellar Messages.”  In Spring 2010, he was elected Secretary General of the Japan Anthropology Workshop (JAWS).

Dr. Traphagan teaches courses on religion in East Asia, anthropology and religion, and ethics and medical anthropology.  These include “Japanese Religion and Society,” “Biomedicine, Ethics, and Culture,” and “Sport, Religion and Society.”

NIH Biosketch (pdf)