Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer is Research Professor in the Center for East European and Russian Studies and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Georgetown University. Professor Balzer's research is in social theory, inter-ethnic relations, religion, the growth of nationalism, and anthropology of the Russian Federation. Her extensive fieldwork has focused on Siberia and Central Asia. She has taught at the University of Illinois and the University of Pennsylvania, and held post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard, Columbia, and the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center. She is editor of the journal Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia, and the books Culture Incarnate: Native Anthropology from Russia; Shamanism: Soviet Studies of Traditional Religion in Siberia and Central Asia (1997); and Russian Traditional Culture: Religion, Gender and Customary Law (1992). She also authored The Tenacity of Ethnicity (1999).