Tantric Revisionings

by Geoffrey Samuel

The present volume is a selection of unpublished and previously published work on various aspects of religion in Tibetan, Himalayan and South Asian Societies. It also includes three chapters on Buddhism and Tantra in Western Societies.

About the Author:

Geoffrey Samuel is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. After training in physics at Oxford, he undertook a PhD in social anthropology at Cambridge, carrying out field research on religion and society with Tibetans in Nepal and India in 1971-72. Subsequent fieldwork has included several further research trips to India, Nepal and Tibet, and shorter visits to other Asian societies. He joined the University of Newcastle in 1978 after teaching in the UK, New Zealand and Queensland. From 1995 to 1997, Geoffrey was Professor of Religious Studies at Lancaster University, where he remains an Honorary Professor. He returned to Newcastle in 1998.

Geoffrey is currently the Deputy Head of the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Education and Arts at the University of Newcastle. He is also Associate Director of CAPSTRANS, the joint Newcastle-Wollongong Key Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies.

Geoffrey's specialist fields include the anthropology of Buddhist societies, and of religion in South and Southeast Asia more generally; the anthropology of "shamanic" practices; anthropological theory, especially concerning formal and informal knowledge in human society. He has also carried out research on Buddhism and other new religious movements in Western societies, and in ethnomusicology.