Laurah E. Klepinger, Ph.D.

Biography

Laurah Klepinger is a cultural anthropologist and Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Utica College (2016-17). Courses she is teaching at UC are: Introduction to Anthropology (ANT 101), Food and Culture (ANT 367), Medical Anthropology (ANT 415), and a Special Topics (ANT 300) course called Inside Globalization.

Dr. Klep holds a Ph.D. and MA in Anthropology from Syracuse University, a Master of Arts in Dance (Performance and Culture) and a Master of Fine Arts in Dance (Choreography) from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. Before that, she completed a Bachelor of Dance Arts from the University of Michigan, with a minor in Religion.

Klepinger’s doctoral dissertation is a study of workers in the South Indian branches of a transnational yoga institution whose mission is “to spread peace, health and joy through yoga.” She conducted more than four years of ethnographic research and language study in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, India, as well as additional research in North America to understand the life experiences and perspectives of both Indian and international volunteers as well as paid workers. Her work is broadly concerned with relations of inequality and with issues of intercultural understanding and cultural appropriation in the context of globalization. Her newest project is a comparative study of the natural birth and natural parenting movements in the United States and India and also examines the aspirational politics of “natural” infant and toddler feeding.