Gregory L. Forth is a retired professor of anthropology at the

University of Alberta The University of Alberta (also known as U of A or UAlberta, ) is a public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford, the first premier of Alberta, and Henry Marshall Tory, t ...

. He earned his PhD from

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

in 1980. Beginning in 1986, Forth was a professor at the University of Alberta for over thirty years. Forth is a fellow of the

Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; , SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities, and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bilingual council of distinguishe ...

. As a social anthropologist, Forth's position is both

structuralist Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns tha ...

and interpretivist. He is known for his contributions to ethnoscience. Forth has conducted fieldwork in eastern Indonesia, and has worked with the Kéo and

Nage The Nage are an indigenous people living on the eastern Indonesian islands of Flores (chiefly in the eponymous Nagekeo Regency), and Timor. They are descended from the indigenous population of Flores They are largely assimilated by the neighbor ...

Flores Flores is one of the Lesser Sunda Islands, a group of islands in the eastern half of Indonesia. Administratively, it forms the largest island in the East Nusa Tenggara Province. The area is 14,250 km2. Including Komodo and Rinca islands ...

island. In November 2020, his book ''A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in Eastern Indonesian Society'' won the

Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year The ''Bookseller''/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, originally known as the Diagram Group Prize for the Oddest Title and commonly known as the Diagram Prize, is a humorous literary award that is given annually to a book with an unusu ...

. In February 2023, Forth suggests in his book, ''Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid'', based on stories told by natives of Flores, Indonesia, that the diminutive humanoid ''

Homo floresiensis ''Homo floresiensis'' , also known as "Flores Man" or "Hobbit" (after Hobbit, the fictional species), is an Extinction, extinct species of small archaic humans that inhabited the island of Flores, Indonesia, until the arrival of Homo sapiens, ...

'' could still be alive in Indonesia, citing indigenous accounts of the folk creature ebu gogo or the lai ho'a.

Publications

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References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Forth, Gregory Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Canadian anthropologists Flores Island (Indonesia) Alumni of the University of Oxford