SCOTT ATRAN is an anthropologist known for his work on the importance of "devoted actors" in cultural, political, and religious conflicts, and for studies on indigenous environmental management and the transcultural cognitive foundations of biological classification. Atran was born in New York City and grew up near Baltimore. He received a BA from Columbia College, an MA in social relations from Johns Hopkins in 1973, and a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1984 after time spent as a Fulbright Scholar in the Middle East and a researcher at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. Atran is co-founder and science director at Artis International, a research institute conducting field studies in distressed world regions and developing online tools for managing socio-political conflict and competition. He is co-founder of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict and Research Fellow for the Changing Character of War Centre at Oxford University; Research Professor at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy and Institute for Social Research; and Emeritus Research Director in Anthropology at France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is a member of the Cognitive Science Society and the National Academy of Sciences.
Atran's books include Talking to the Enemy, the Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, and The Native Mind: Cognition and Culture in Human Knowledge of Nature (co-authored with Douglas Medin).
