Directors
- Adam Louis-Klein is a writer, anthropologist, and philosopher whose work bridges ethnography, civilizational analysis, and comparative thought. He is completing a PhD in Anthropology at McGill University, where his research explores Jewish peoplehood, Zionism, and contemporary antisemitism through comparative work on indigeneity, translation, and cosmology in the northwest Amazon. His fieldwork with the Desana people of the Vaupés region examines how cosmological and genealogical forms generate collective identity. Drawing analogies between Desana and Jewish conceptions of peoplehood, his research engages questions of sovereignty, sacred geography, and recursive ethnography. Adam’s essays—appearing in The Free Press, Tablet, and The Times of Israel—address the symbolic and political structures of antisemitism and seek to rearticulate Jewish identity and continuity in an age of ideological inversion. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Yale, an M.A. in Philosophy from the New School, and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. He is co-director of Oscillations: Non-Standard Experiments in Anthropology, the Social Sciences, and Cosmology, and a Postgraduate Fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.
- Justin Shaffner is an anthropologist and writer whose work bridges ethnography, civilizational renewal, and theophanic anthropology. He is completing a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Cambridge on the Anim (Boazi) peoples of Papua New Guinea, following Nggiwe, an itinerant covenant-renewer, to study how covenant, genealogy, and ritual drive ethnogenesis amid contemporary pressures on land and life. His theophanic anthropology treats revelation—as event, image, and practice—as a mode of knowledge that discloses how persons and peoples recompose covenant and world. Extending this inquiry, his research develops Islam as a civilizational grammar, where prophetic recursion serves as a living method of repair across traditions. With Adam Louis-Klein, he co-creates Sky–Earth Systems Science (SESS), a planetary practice of reciprocity and design that extends symmetric anthropology while disclosing itself as an analog of prophetic recursion — a science in the lineage of covenantal renewal. He is co-founder of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory and co-director of Oscillations. He holds a B.A. in Anthropology and Philosophy from the University of Virginia. He is currently preparing a forthcoming book, The Muhammadan Event, articulating Islam as a recursive civilizational unfolding across prophetic traditions and sciences.
Advisory Board
- Bruce Albert, Research Institute for Development (IRD), Paris
- Lino Alemán, Desana People, Ümükori Mahsã-Boreka Porã clan. Associación de Autoridades Tradicionales Indigenas Del Bajo Vaupes (ASATRIBVA)
- Edward P. Butler, Center for Polytheism Studies at Indic Academy
- Acacea Lewis, Divine Master Alchemy
- Patrice Maniglier, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre
- Andrew Moutu, Papua New Guinea National Museum & Art Gallery
- Denise Ferreira da Silva, University of British Columbia
Affiliated Researchers
- Lucas Ferraço Nassif, Portuguese Center of Psychoanalysis (Lisbon, Portugal)
- Thomas Sullivan