Thomas K. Park

Bio

Thomas K. Park has taught in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona since 1986. He received a joint PhD in anthropology and comparative world history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1983, an MA in agricultural economics in 1982, and a BA with Joint First Class Honors in anthropology and philosophy from McGill University in 1974. He has worked extensively in North Africa and across sub-Saharan Africa on land tenure, urban and rural development. In acknowledgement of the hundreds of wonderful people he has encountered in Africa and the Near East since he attended school in Uganda and Tanzania in 1961-1962, Dr. Park has taught courses on global inequality every year since 1986. His first publication on the economy of dynastic Egypt, “Early Trends toward Class Stratification: Chaos, Common Property and Flood Recession Agriculture,” appeared in the American Anthropologist in 1992. Dr. Park’s hobbies are languages, mathematics, astronomy and cycling.

Research Interests

Urbanization in Africa and the Middle East, complexity theory, economic theory, mathematical methodologies in anthropology and history, the history of credit, flood recession agriculture, the Sahara, the Sahel, North Africa, development, economic history, North African Arabic archives, bureaucracy in Africa and the Middle East, colonialism & imperialism, anthropology of law, Islam, land tenure, 18th to 21st C European philosophy, foragers in arid lands, pastoralism, Pyrrhonic skepticism, political ecology.