Peter G. Stromberg

Peter Stromberg

Professor of Anthropology Harwell Hall  2nd Floor
(918)631 2801
peter-Stromberg@utulsa.eduPersonal Page

I received my PhD in Anthropology from Stanford in 1981. I completed post-doctoral training at the Departments of Psychiatry and Anthropology at the University of California San Diego and at the Institute of Human Development at the University of California Berkeley. In 1985 I moved to the University of Arizona and taught in the Anthropology Department there for two years as a visiting assistant professor. In 1987 I moved to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa where I am now a Professor.

My published writing and teaching have been oriented around a set of theoretical problems about the nature of the self and community in the contemporary societies of Europe and the United States. In particular, I have studied experiences of self-transformation in a number of different contexts—in religion, entertainment and drug use, and in psychotherapy.

These systems of self-transformation, which have developed alongside the institutions of expressive individualism in the West, promise to address a broad range of behavioral and emotional problems including depression, anxiety, and addiction. They have grown up across several institutional realms, including religion, leisure, and medical care. While the details of these therapeutic systems vary widely, their general approach is consistent: through creating symbolic and narrative coherence, the self is said to be transformable, and through this transformation persistent difficulties will be overcome.

In the last 15 years I have completed two monographs on self-transformation. The first was Language and Self-Transformation (1993, Cambridge University Press). Working from detailed transcriptions of Christian conversion narratives, I investigated the relationship between Christian rhetoric and the emotional situation of the narrating subject. I showed how processes of identification with that rhetoric enable believers to come to terms with potentially crippling emotional ambivalence. Thus, acceptance of the beliefs of the group is mediated in part through inarticulate processes of believers' emotional responses to Christian imagery.
More recently, I have completed a book entitled Caught in Play (under review, Palgrave-Macmillan). Here my topic is contemporary entertainment culture. When persons become absorbed in playful activities such as reading, film-viewing, game-playing, or even recreational drug use they may have moments in which they feel carried away, merged with a fantasy that (in Colin Campbell’s phrase) they know to be false but feel to be true. Such experiences are not the trivialities they first appear to be, for through them men and women become committed to ideas that seem to have the power to transport them to other realms. (Think for example of the powerful cultural conception of romantic love).

Over the next five years I intend to expand my study of self-transformation into the domain of dynamic psychotherapy. I hope to be able to apply the perspective I have been developing over the last 25 years to a topic where it would seem to have an obvious relevance: the capacity of language-based therapies to effectively ameliorate certain sorts of entrenched psychological symptoms.

Education and Degrees Earned

  • B.S. Mathematics, Purdue University, 1974
  • B.A. Anthropology, Purdue University, 1974
  • Ph.D. Cultural Anthropology, Stanford University, 1981

Previous Teaching Experience

  • University of California, Berkeley, Sociology Department, 1983
  • University of Arizona, Anthropology Department, 1984-1987

Previous Relevant Work Experience

  • Research Associate, Medical Anthropology, 1983-84
    • University of California San Francisco

Professional Affiliations

  • Society for American Archaeology
  • Society for Archaeological Sciences
  • Paleoanthropology Society

Courses Taught at TU

  • Contemporary Anthropological Problems (ANTH 4863)
  • History of Anthropological Theory (ANTH 7123)
  • Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion (ANTH 3443)
  • Patterns in Culture: Cultural Anthropology (ANTH 2043 )
  • Qualitative Research Methods (ANTH 6403)

Awards & Recognition

  • 1974 Both undergraduate degrees awarded "with highest distinction," Purdue University
  • 1974 Phi Beta Kappa, Purdue University
  • 1976 National Science Foundation, Graduate Fellowship
  • 1978 American-Scandinavian Foundation, Research Fellowship
  • 1978 Fulbright Research Fellowship
  • 1978 Social Science Research Council, Research Fellowship
  • 1979 National Institute of Mental Health, Postdoctoral Fellowship, Stanford University
  • 1981 National Institute of Mental Health, Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of California at San Diego
  • 1983 National Institute of Mental Health, Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of California at Berkeley
  • 1986 American-Scandinavian Foundation, Research Fellowship

Publications

  • Caught In Play: How entertainment works on you
    Stanford University Press, 2008.
  • Symbolic Valorization in the Culture of Entertainment: The Example of Legal Drug Use
    Anthropological Theory. 2008.
  • Taking Play Seriously: Low level smoking among college students
    (with Mark Nichter and Mimi Nichter). Culture, Medicine and Psychology 31: 1-24. 2007.