Name: Sergei Kan (e-mail)
Title: Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies
Education: Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, 1980
Courses Taught: NAS 10, NAS 37, NAS 49
Curriculum Vitae [Word Document]
Sharing our Knowledge: A Conference of Tlingit Tribes and Clans March 25-28, 2009
Professor Kan has been teaching in the NAS and Anthropology at Dartmouth since 1989. Prior to that he taught at the University of Michigan. He has taught the following courses: "Peoples and Cultures of Native North America," "The Land of the Totem Poles: Native Peoples of the Northwest Coast," "Native Americans and Christianity," "Native American Autobiography," a seminar "Sacred Objects, Sacred Persons: Native American Spirituality Through Artifacts," which utilized Dartmouth's Hood Museum collection, and a senior seminar "American Indians, American Anthropologists." Starting in the winter term 2009 he will offer a regular new course "Alaska: American Dreams and Native Realities." His teaching and research interests include the culture and history of Native Alaskans and Native Americans of the Northwest Coast, Native American religion, indigenous Siberian cultures, ethnohistory, anthropology of death and dying, anthropology of religion, history of anthropology (including relations between Native Americans and anthropologists), and methods of ethnographic research. Since 1979 he has been conducting ethnographic and archival research among the Tlingit people of southeastern Alaska (his most recent visit there occurred in the fall of 2007); he has been adopted into two Tlingit clans, participates regularly in conferences sponsored by local tribal governments, and does occasional research projects for the Tlingit community. In 2006 he helped secure an NSF grant for a major conference held in Sitka, Alaska in March 2007 ("Sharing Our Knowledge: a Conference of Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian Tribes and Clans"). The conference was the largest gathering of tribal and academic historians, cultural activists, clan leaders, and tradition bearers.
Professor Kan is the author of numerous articles on the past and present Tlingit culture, the effects of Russian Orthodox missionary activities on Native Alaskans, and the history of non-Native images of Native Alaskans. In 1989 Smithsonian Institution Press published his book Symbolic Immortality: Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century which received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. His second monograph Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity Through Two Centuries was published by the University of Washington Press in 1999. In 2001 the University of Nebraska Press published a volume of essays edited by him, entitled Strangers to Relatives: the Adoption and Naming of Anthropologists in Native North America. Three years later the same press produced a volume of essays he co-edited, entitled Coming to Shore: Northwest Coast Ethnology: Traditions and Visions. In 2006 New Perspectives on Native North America: Culture, History, and Representation, another major collection of essays, co-edited by Prof. Kan, came out with University of Nebraska Press. Recently Prof. Kan completed a manuscript entitled Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist. This book will be published in early 2009. He is also engaged in a new research project dealing with photographs taken by a Russian-American photographer (Vincent Soboleff) in the Tlingit communities of Killisnoo and Angoon in the early 1900s.
