Roderick B. Campbell

Over the last 15 or so years, while itinerantly living in Taiwan and China, Rod Campbell earned a B.A. from the University of Victoria in English and Chinese literature, an M.A. from the University of British Columbia in Ancient Chinese paleography and linguistics (oracle-bones and bronze inscriptions) and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Anthropology and East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His dissertation synthesized epigraphic, archaeological and classical textual sources and focused on kinship and violence in the production of the Late Shang (ca. 1250-1050 B.C.) world order. This work was simultaneously an attempt to de-link the narrative of early Chinese civilization from teleologies of rationality and reductionist evolutionism while exploring a socio-phenomenological approach to historical change. Rod's current research interests include the social archaeology of Bronze-Age Chinese houses, villages and communities, a comparative and deep historic exploration of the relationships between changing forms of violence (physical, structural, symbolic etc.), socio-political organization, and being-in-the-world, and the development of a "networks and boundaries" approach to the diachronic study of socio-political entities.