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Julia Cassaniti

Professor

Julia Cassaniti is an anthropologist of mind and culture in contemporary religious contexts of transnational Asia. Her work examines relationships between social, mental, and physical influences on health and well-being, and the patterned approaches by which people construct reality through idiosyncratic implementations of cultural ideologies. Dr. Cassaniti has specialized in Theravāda Buddhist interpretations in Northern Thailand, with ethnographic emphases on embodiment, including issues of gender and sexuality, and ideology, both from past texts and popular media. Her books include Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia (Cornell U. Press); Universalism Without Uniformity: Explorations in Mind and Culture (U. Chicago Press); and Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community (Cornell U. Press), which won the American Anthropological Association’s Stirling Prize for Best Book in Psychological Anthropology. Current interests include temporality, attention, and perception, and the effects of their different considerations for everyday life and mental disorder in Thailand, Japan, and around the world.