Kevin D. Pittle
- Former user (Deleted)
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
- Ph.D., Florida State University
Dr. Pittle received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Florida State University in the Fall of 2005. His research interests generally focus around the intersection of language and culture, with theoretical and methodological emphases in cognitive anthropology, the anthropology of consciousness, ethnolinguistics, comparative folklore and mythology, and the anthropology of religion.
Dr. Pittle has formally studied a number of languages, including Arabic (Modern Standard, Tunisian Colloquial and Levantine Colloquial), Egyptian (Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphic and Sahidic Coptic), French, Greek (Koine), Hebrew, Latin, Mayan (Chol and Hieroglyphic), and a smattering of Southeastern American Indian languages. He has informally studied Aramaic, Etruscan, Greek Linear-B, Moabite, Phoenician and Ugaritic (Canaanite).
Dr. Pittle has been conducting ethnographic field research among Neo-Kabbalists in the Los Angeles area from 2005-present and has been engaged in participant observation in Messianic Jewish congregations in Florida, Oregon and California since 2002. He has also conducted field research in Tunisia (2004), in an Egyptian immigrant community in Florida (2004) and a Taoism-based New Religious Movement in Florida (1993). He also spent the better part of a year as a “sojourner” in Israel and the Occupied Territories of Palestine after receiving his BA degree (1995) and completed a term of service in AmeriCorps (the domestic version of the Peace Corps) in 1998.
Dr. Pittle is currently revising his dissertation, Continuity and Change in Islamic Ethnopharmacological Practice: New Methods in Cognitive Dialectometry (2005) into a book for Mellen Press. His recent conference paper presentations include “Expanded Consciousness through Imagistic Contemplation in Mystical Judaism: Metaphor, Holography and Spiritual Maps of the Infinite” (presented to the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness), and “Neo-Kabbalist Discourse(s) and the Demythologization of Modernist Science” (presented to the Society for the Anthropology of Religion). He is currently working on a paper on “Kabbalistic Insights on Problems of Scope and Directionality in the Cybernetics of ‘Mind at Large’” which he plans to deliver to the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness in the spring of 2009.
Dr. Pittle is a recipient of the Anne S. Chatham Fellowship in Medicinal Botany (2004). He has also been awarded two Biola University Faculty Research Grants (2006-2007 and 2008-2009) for his ongoing studies of Judaism-based New Religious Movements.