Experts & Expertise

• Comparison of cultures
• Cultural diversity
• History of cultural anthropology
• Human evolution
• Human-animal relationships
• Philosophy
• Philosophy of social sciences and humanities
• Tribal art

BA Philosophy, 1975; BA Cultural Anthropology, 1976; BA Psychology, 1979; MA Philosophy, 1982; PhD Philosophy, 1988 - all at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.PhD thesis: De mens een dier? Scheler, Plessner en de crisis van het traditionele mensbeeld.

Supervisors: C.E.M. Struyker Boudier and G. Verwey.

For an interview on some of my recent research interests (in Dutch), see article, PDF-file

1987-1990 junior lecturer of cultural philosophy, Departments of Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology, Radboud University Nijmegen.

1990-2007 lecturer (tenured) of philosophy ("filosofische antropologie"), Department of Philosophy of Tilburg University.

2007- associate professor (tenured) of philosophy ("filosofische antropologie"), Department of Philosophy of Tilburg University.

1994-1999 and 2001-2004 senior researcher, Department of Archaeology (Palaeolithic Research Group) of Leiden University.

2006- Chair, Epistemology of Archaeology, Departments of Archeology and Philosophy of Leiden University.

My research deals with human and animal cognition, sociality, and culture in an evolutionary perspective. I look at philosophical views and their history, in particular how they guide research in ethnology, palaeoanthropology, and primatology, in the sense of epistemology ('Grundlagenforschung', the analysis of conceptualisation and presuppositions) of those disciplines. In particular I am interested in the reception and rebuttal of evolutionary analysis in 20th-century and present-day continental-European philosophy and in the human sciences, for example in research on reciprocity and exchange and on narrative meaning (in myth, ritual, art). One angle of approach here is ethnozoology, specifically the relations between folk taxonomies and scientific taxonomy (e.g., of primates and humans). There is intensive cooperation with several anthropological/archaeological research programs at Leiden University.

A second line of research and publications focuses on western representations and practices (stereotypes, photography, collecting, exhibiting, missions, image breaking), colonial and post-colonial, regarding nonwestern societies and, in particular, nonwestern ritual art.

At the intersection of these two lines of research are such issues as the use of animal metaphors for cultural others, and paralleles between western domination over colonial others and human domination over (the rest of) nature.

For pdf's of many of my publications, including books, see

http://www.creamofscience.org/nl/page/search.results/show?institute=uvt&searchset=keurset&author=%28Corbey%29

R.H.A. Corbey teaches the following subjects:

• Philosophical seminar 2 (700012) Further information
• Philosophical Anthropology (700157) Further information
• Advanced Conceptions of human existence (799232) Further information
• Philosophy of Communication (820020) Further information
• Methodology 1 (840053) Further information
• Theories on Narrative (840056) Further information
• Concepts of being Human (700178) Further information

Next to my activities at Tilburg University I hold a chair in the epistemology of the human sciences in the Departments of Archaeology and Philosophy of Leiden University (http://www.archaeology.leiden.edu/organisation/staff/corbey.html).

I have been and continue to be involved with several strongly interdisciplinary archaeological/ anthropological research programs at Leiden University (various regions and periods), focussing on theoretical and conceptual issues and co-supervising PhD research.

I have been visiting scholar for periods up to one year at the Husserl Institute of Leuven University (Belgium), the Smithsonian Institution (African Art/Natural History; Washington DC), the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity of University College London, and the Department of Anthropology of the University of British Columbia (Vancouver).

Regular advisorships to (mainly ethnological) museums and exhibitions in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Germany. Referee for various academic presses and journals on a regular basis.