Peek, Philip M. 1943-

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PEEK, Philip M. 1943-

PERSONAL:

Born July 7, 1943.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Anthropology, Drew University, Madison, NJ 07940.

CAREER:

Anthropologist, curator, educator, and author. Drew University, Madison NM, instructor, then professor of anthropology; curator of museum exhibits, including "Ways of the River," 2002.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Choice Outstanding Academic Book designation, 1991, for African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1991.

(Editor, with Martha G. Anderson) Ways of the Rivers: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta, UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History (Los Angeles, CA), 2001.

(Editor, with Kwesi Yankah) African Folklore: An Encyclopedia, Garland (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Africa: A Study Guide to Better Understanding, edited by C. A. Geoffrion, Indiana University Press, 1970. Contributor to journals, including African Arts and Research in African Literatures.

SIDELIGHTS:

Anthropologist Philip M. Peek has devoted his career to the study of African folklore, divination, and tradition-based knowledge systems. After doing his fieldwork among the Isoko people of the Niger delta region in the early 1970s, Peek has gone on to attain a position as professor of anthropology at Duke University. In his edited volume African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing, published in 1991, he collects essays presented during a 1981 panel of the African Studies Association whose participants describe the role divination—the practice of predicting future events through the use of supernatural abilities—continues to play within many of that continent's native cultures. Noting the changing approaches anthropologists took to the study of religions beginning in the 1970s, Brad Weiss commented in his American Ethnologist review that the book's "theoretical scope and ethnographic detail will appeal to scholars of religion, as well as to those who are more generally interested in the creation, representation, and transformation of knowledge." Praising the bibliography and introductory notes as "uniformly instructive," African Affairs critic Richard Fardon cited African Divination Systems as a useful volume for students and tutors, both of whom "will be grateful for the lengthy effort Peek has expended on this volume." Equally appreciative of Peek's contributions to a book with "a coherence … often missing from edited conference proceedings," Stephen D. Glazier concluded in his review for the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion that African Divination Systems "makes important contributions to ongoing debates in cognitive studies, anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, ethnoscience, semiotics, and religious studies."

Together with museum curator Martha G. Anderson, Peek has also edited Ways of the River: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta, a book based on an exhibit the two editors staged at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2002. In their examination of the many ethnic groups that have resided in Nigeria's fragile delta region, the volume's contributors—which include Joseph Eboreime, Lisa Aronson, E. E. Efere, and E. J. Alagoa—discuss the masks, sculpture, and other art forms springing up from the warrior and other cultures of the region, and theorize as to the future of native tribes—such as Ijo, Urhobo, and Isoko—as Western oil companies make inroads into the region to tap its underground resources. Reviewing the book for Library Journal, Nancy B. Turner praised Ways of the River as an "excellent" introduction to a region of the world whose inhabitants have "long participated in a vibrant and widespread exchange of ideas and art forms."