Don Selby

Don Selby obtained a B.A. at Trent University, in Peterborough, Canada, in International Development Studies, with a specific interest in postcolonial theory and international human rights. He pursued these interests in an M.A. at McGill University (Montréal, Canada), then went to the New School for Social Research to revisit these questions ethnographically as an advisee of Professor Veena Das. When Das joined the anthropology department at Johns Hopkins University, he followed her, completing his dissertation on the emergence of human rights in Thailand there. His research has had three foci. The first, undertaken in Thailand, focused on how a particular convergence of events and forces in turn-of-the-millennium Thailand fostered the emergence of human rights there on a national scale. He explored these themes in several papers and his book, Human Rights in Thailand, which was published 2018 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. A second ethnographic project, which began in August of 2017, examines atheism in America with a particular focus on how atheism figures in people’s everyday lives at a moment (the early twenty-first century) when religious affiliation is on the decline, but religion in politics appears ascendant. A sabbatical in 2020 was to allow more extensive fieldwork, but that fieldwork was suspended in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. That time was, instead, turned over to the production of two essays, one returning to Thailand (“Buddhism, Kingship and Coups: Lèse-Majesté and the Slide Towards Absolute Monarchy in Thailand,” which came out in 2023 in Buddhism, Law, and Society), and the other oriented to the work on atheism (“Moral by Nature” in Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism). He is, in addition, engaged in another book project exploring the adoption of ordinary language philosophy in anthropology, which springs partly from a long-standing interest in this topic (as seen in, for example, “Form of Life, Buddhism, and Human Rights” in Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies in 2019), and partly from experiences teaching anthropological writing from this tradition in the capstone Sociology/Anthropology 400 course.