Joseph Bosco

Joseph Bosco is an anthropologist and currently a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He majored in Biology and Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and received his PhD from at Columbia University in New York City. He taught anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong from 1992 to 2016, when he moved to St. Louis.

He has conducted fieldwork in Panama on tropical deforestation, in Taiwan on rural development and industrialization, and in Hong Kong and south China on consumerism, and on religion and the supernatural. He has long been interested in how economic behavior (and what people consider to be ‘rational’) depends on cultural assumptions.

He is currently researching the use, misuse, and fear of pesticides in Taiwan, focusing on how farmers and consumers deal with the uncertainty of science. In 2015-16, he spent 8 months in Taiwan interviewing villagers and farmers (and as many organic farmers as he could find) in the same area where he had lived 30 years earlier for his dissertation research. He is very interested in sustainable agriculture and social justice, and looks forward to broadening his knowledge of sustainable farming and supporting EarthDance as a board member.