Thomas Buckley

Harry Roberts (1906–81), a Yurok-trained spiritual teacher from whom Buckley learned, adopted him as his nephew in 1971.

Buckley taught anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, for many years and at other institutions as a visiting professor.

Thomas Crowell-Taylor "Tim" Buckley (May 28, 1942 – April 16, 2015) was an American anthropologist and Buddhist monastic best known for his long-term ethnographic research with the Yurok Indians of northern California, his early work in the anthropology of reproduction, including menstruation and culture and for his major reevaluation of the work of Alfred L. Kroeber.

His decades-long fieldwork with the Yuroks, beginning in 1976 (following upon Buddhist training in California under Shunryu Suzuki, 1965–71), culminated in his ethnographic monograph Standing Ground, published in 2002.

(For this publication he had an honorable mention in the Victor Turner Prize award by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.)

He received his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1982 from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Raymond D. Fogelson.

On January 22, 2013 he was ordained as a Soto Zen Buddhist priest, Jōkan Zenshin, by the Rev. Peter Schneider at Beginner's Mind Zen Center in Northridge, California, and established a lay community group, Great River Zendo, in midcoast Maine.

Buckley died in West Bath, Maine on April 16, 2015.

He is survived by his wife Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College.