Gregory A. Ruf
Visiting Associate Professor
[Stony Brook University]
Greg Ruf is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose interests include political ecology and rural development, social organization and gender, as well as as well as theoretical and methodological issues in ethnography.
He received his Ph.D (1994) from Columbia University, where he also earned a Certificate of Specialization in Modern China (1989) from Columbia's East Asian Institute. A recipient of the An Wang Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Professor Ruf joined the faculty at Stony Brook University (SUNY) in 1995, where he holds a joint appointment in Anthropology and Asian and Asian American Studies. At Stony Brook, he is part of the graduate faculty in Anthropological Sciences, and has formerly served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the China Studies Program, for the new Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, and for an applied-research minor in Community Service Learning.
Professor Ruf's current research focuses on water resources and environment management in China. In 2002, he was a Fulbright Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Yunnan University (China), where he pursued archival and field research on water-related issues along China's southwestern frontier, particularly the Lancang/Mekong watershed.
His interest in China began as an undergraduate exchange student in 1982-83, and since then he has spent many years living, traveling, and conducting research in both Mainland China and Taiwan, as well as among Chinese immigrants in Brooklyn. His work focuses on rural development and environmental management issues, particularly in the southwest part of China, the provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan.
His publications include Cadres & Kin: Making a Socialist Village in West
China, 1921-91 (Stanford), “Collective Enterprise and Property Rights
in a Sichuan Village: The Rise and Decline of Managerial Corporatism,” in
Oi & Walder (eds.), Property Rights and Economic Reform in China (Stanford),
and "Reflections of the Field, from the Field," in Liu Xin (ed.),
Reflections on the Anthropology of China (California). His review of Judith
Shapiro’s Mao’s War Against Nature is accessible on-line at the
Journal of Political Ecology: http://www.library.arizona.edu/ej/jpe/volume_8/1101ruf.html]