Roy Rappaport

Roy Abraham Rappaport (1926–1997) was an American anthropologist known for his contributions to the anthropological study of ritual and to ecological anthropology. Biography Rappaport was born in New York City on 25 March 1926. He received his Ph.D. at Columbia University and held a tenured position at the University of Michigan. One of his publications, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (1968), is an ecological account of ritual among the Tsembaga Maring of New Guinea. This book is often considered the most influential and most cited work in ecological anthropology (see McGee and Warms 2004). In that book, and elaborated elsewhere, Rappaport coined the distinction between a people's cognized environment and their operational environment, that is, between how a people understand the effects of their actions in the world and how an anthropologist interprets the environment through measurement and observation. Rappaport served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan. He also was a past president of the American Anthropological Association. Rappaport died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 9 October 1997.