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Brian Palmer (social anthropologist)

American anthropologist

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ4964985 ↗
Source-derived summary

Brian Charles William Palmer (born 1964) is an American social anthropologist and scholar of religion at Uppsala University.

Biography

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Brian Palmer graduated valedictorian of his class at Stuyvesant High School, and later he received his doctorate at Harvard University in 2000 with the dissertation Wolves at the Door: Existential Solidarity in a Globalizing Sweden, was lecturer on the Modern West until 2004. He was also the university's head tutor on religion. In 2002 he was voted "best lecturer" at Harvard University.

Personal

Brian Palmer currently lives in Stockholm.

Work

Brian Palmer currently teaches at Uppsala University in Sweden, while also lecturing widely outside the university. Previously he held the Torgny Segerstedt Guest Professorship at Gothenburg University. Some of his works were focused on Sweden such as the country's form of socialistic individualism. He maintained that in this system, the presence of certain institutions creates a level of security for citizens, which paradoxically also leads to more freedom. He also explored the incidence of social dislocation, proposing that the countryside is itself a site of historical transformation, generating social relations, and demographic changes.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Brian Palmer (social anthropologist)” as american anthropologist. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1964, 2000, 2004, 2002—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1964-10-04. The account is most persuasive where Brian, Palmer and social can be independently traced.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american anthropologist. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4964985. VIAF identifies the subject as 180100265. The Library of Congress control number is no2007003892. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1964, 2000, 2004 and 2002.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Brian Palmer (social anthropologist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.