Christopher Nelson is a cultural anthropologist. His research interests include the relationship between history and memory; the critical study of everyday life; storytelling, ritual and performance; value, exchange and sacrifice. He has done ethnographic fieldwork in Japan for nearly three decades, and recently completed book about the relationship between workers, artists, anthropologists, political activists, shaman and the dead in Okinawa. Nelson has been a Marine infantry officer, a truck driver, a factory worker, an editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology, and has taught at Carolina for the past twenty years. He is also an enthusiastic walker and hiker.