Richard A. Shweder

Richard A. Shweder is a cultural anthropologist and the Harold Higgins Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. degree in social anthropology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University in 1972, taught a year at the University of Nairobi in Kenya and has been at the University of Chicago ever since.

He is author of Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology and Why Do Men Barbecue? Recipes for Cultural Psychology and editor or co-editor of many books in the areas cultural psychology, psychological anthropology and comparative human development. He was the Editor-in-Chief of a reference work on diversity in child and adolescent development titled The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion.

Professor Shweder has been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a Carnegie Scholar, and the recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Socio-Psychological Prize for his essay “Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served as President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology and recently (2016) received their Life Time Achievement Award. He has twice been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto (1985-86 and 1995-96), where he has co-chaired a special project on “Culture, Mind and Biology.” He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (1990-91). He has been a Hewlett Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (2003-2004) and a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University Hoover Institution (Spring 2005 and Spring 2006). During the 1999-2000 academic year he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (The Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin) where he co-edited an issue of Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Autumn 2000) entitled The End of Tolerance: Engaging Cultural Differences. In 2008-2009 was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has been a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Midlife Development (MICMAC). For many years he co-chaired a joint Social Science Research Council/Russell Sage Foundation Working Group on “Law and Culture“(previously named “Ethnic Customs, Assimilation and American Law”), which was concerned with the issue of the “Free exercise of culture: How Free Is It? How Free Ought It To Be?”

For several decades Professor Shweder has conducted research in cultural psychology on moral reasoning, emotional functioning, gender roles, explanations of illness, ideas about the causes suffering, and the moral foundations of family life practices in the Hindu temple town of Bhubaneswar on the East Coast of India. His research also examines the scopes and limits of liberal pluralism and the moral challenge of cultural migration in Western liberal democracies.