David F. Lancy, originally from western Pennsylvania, earned degrees from Yale and the University of Pittsburgh. He has done fieldwork in Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Trinidad, Sweden and the United States. His research interests include the study of cultural influences on children's literacy, ethnographic research methods, and the anthropology of childhood. Dr. Lancy's teaching interests include the study of ancient civilizations, especially Egypt, and the anthropology of childhood. He currently teaches four courses: Civilization/Humanities (USU 1320), Anthropology and Education (ANTH 2010 Peoples of the Contemporary World), Archaeology of Ancient Civilizations (ANTH 3350), and the Anthropology of Childhood (ANTH 4120). From 1996 to 2001 he and a team of students gathered material on Ancient Egypt to incorporate into an instructional CD-ROM called "Whose Mummy Is It?" This interactive CD-ROM has been used in Dr. Lancy's USU 1320 class for over five years. In 1999, Dr. Lancy initiated a national program to support undergraduate research. In 2001, he was honored by the Carnegie Foundation as Utah's Professor of the Year. Since 1996, David Lancy has regularly led anthropology tours including several to Egypt, as well as Central Asia, the Middle East, Morocco, and Turkey.
Articles
“First You Must Master Pain:” The Nature and Purpose of Apprenticeship, Society for the Anthropology of Work Review (2012)
The goal of this study is to distill from a large body of literature on...
Unmasking Children's Agency, AnthropoChildren (2012)
The goal of this paper is to identify (unmask) and critique the movement to promote...
Why Anthropology of Childhood? A short history of an emerging discipline, AnthropoChildren (2012)
The paper has four goals: to refute the claim that anthropologists have not studied childhood;...
“Getting Noticed”: Middle Childhood inCross-Cultural Perspective (with M. A. Grove), Human Nature (2011)
Although rarely named, the majority of societies in the ethnographic record demarcate a period between...
Books
Playing on the Mother Ground: Cultural Routines for Children’s Development, SSWA Faculty Publications (1996)
Contributions to Books
“Babies Aren’t Persons”: A Survey of Delayed Personhood, Different Faces of Attachment: Cultural Variations of a Universal Human Need (2013)
To better understand attachment from a cross-cultural and historical perspective, I have amassed over 200...
Presentations
Monkey See, Monkey Do: Evidence of a Cultural Acquisition Device, Multiple Perspectives on the Evolution of
Childhood
(2012)
Apprenticeship: A Survey of Ethnographic and Historical Sources, Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past (2011)
Cross‐cultural Perspectives on Agency Across the Lifespan: Infancy (with Elizabeth Payne), “Children's Agency” Second Joint
AAACIG/SCCR Conference
(2011)
Les Tâches Ménagères, Agricole et Butinage: L'éducation Avant la
Scolarisatio, Séminaire “Regards Croisés sur la Petite Enfance” (2011)
The Chore Curriculum: Education Before Schooling, Schooling in Anthropology: Learning the “Modern Way” (2011)
Other
The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood (with John Bock and Suzanne Gaskins), Utah State University Faculty Monographs (2010)
This first major anthropological reference book on childhood learning considers the cultural aspects of learning...
The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings, Utah State University Faculty Monographs (2008)
The raising of children, their role in society, and the degree to which family and...