#733 Anthropologist Roy Grinker on his book Nobody’s Normal

Roy Richard Grinker is Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Grinker was born and raised in Chicago where his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father worked as psychoanalysts. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1983 and received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University in 1989.

He is the author of Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (NY: W.W. Norton, January 2021), Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism (NY: Basic Books), In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin M. Turnbull (Chicago: University of Chicago), Korea and its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War (NY: St. Martin’s), and Houses in the Rainforest: Ethnicity and Inequality among Farmers and Foragers in Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California). He is co-editor of Perspectives on Africa: Culture, History, and Representation (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell) and Companion to the Anthropology of Africa (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell). Grinker was a 2008 recipient of the National Alliance on Mental Illness KEN award for “outstanding contribution to the understanding of mental illness” and the 2010 recipient of the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology in the Media award for “communication of anthropology to the general public through the media.”