Michael Denley Fischer was born in 1951. He attended the University of Texas, Austin, specializing in anthropology and linguistics, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1974, master's degree in 1980, and Ph.D. in 1986. Fischer has worked in Punjab and Swat in Pakistan, and the Cook Islands. He has held various posts at the University of Kent beginning in 1985, including the director of the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing (from 1990) and professor of Anthropological Sciences at the University of Kent at Canterbury (from 2005).
Fischer's interests and career foci center around knowledge, expression, and ideation. They include the representation and structure of indigenous knoweldge systems, visual anthropology, and computer-assisted anthropological methods and theory. His position on computers and their use in anthropology-- with an analysis of ritual behavior-- is stated in Fischer and Zeitlyn 2003; see also Zeitlyn and Fischer 2002.
The Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing, the University of Kent at Canterbury. http://lucy.kent.ac.uk/
Michael D. Fischer (Personal Website). http://lucy.kent.ac.uk/fischer.html
Fischer, Michael D. and David Zeitlyn. "Visual Anthropology in the Digital Mirror: Computer-Assisted Visual Anthropology." http://lucy.kent.ac.uk/csac/lucy/dz/layers_nggwun.html. 2003
Zeitlyn, David and Michael Fischer. "Ritual, Ideation and Performance: A Case Study of Multimedia in Anthropological Research: The Mambila Nggwun Ritual." Cybernetics and Systems, Volume 1. Edited by R. Trappl. 2002.
Written by: Kate Wilson, 2001
Edited by: Emily Hildebrant, 2007