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Dr. Noah Butler

Advanced Lecturer & Director, Ricci Scholars Program

Noah Butler (PhD, Northwestern) is a Social/Cultural Anthropologist and Africanist. He specializes in Religion (Islam, Sufism in West Africa), Economic Anthropology (money, tribute, commodification), Political Anthropology (followers, clientage, trans-national networks), and the Anthropology of Knowledge (expertise, epistemology, Qur’anic schooling).

Dr. Butler has conducted research primarily in Niger but also elsewhere in West Africa (Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, Ghana).  His initial fieldwork in Niger was a social biography of the country’s most celebrated Sheikh.  In turn, this research led to focusing on followers, spiritual hierarchy, and supra-local and trans-national religious networks in West Africa.  His work in Niger is multi-sited between Niamey, the capital, and the country’s foremost Sufi pilgrimage site.

Dr. Butler has been a recipient of fellowships from various scholarly organizations including the National Science Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Dr. Butler also serves as Director of the Ricci Scholars program.  He has worked closely with this program for over a decade and has supervised multiple Ricci student research projects on a broad range of topics.  The Ricci Scholars program provides impactful opportunities for students to bridge study abroad, experiential learning, and firsthand research experience. It offers funding to highly qualified students to spend their junior year studying and conducting cross-cultural research at Loyola's John Felice Rome Center for the fall semester and then, in the spring semester, at a destination in East Asia (Kansai Gaidai University, Hirakata, Japan;  Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR; or, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea). Students prepare their research proposals and apply for this unique scholarship as sophomores, conduct field research with the support of their seminar professors as juniors, and complete their projects as seniors.

Students are encouraged to reach out to Dr. Butler to discuss the Ricci Scholars program in more detail.

Courses Taught

  • ANTH 100 - Globalization and Local Cultures
  • ANTH 102 - Culture, Society, and Diversity
  • ANTH 207 - Economies, Culture, and Development
  • ANTH 210 - Visual Representation of Culture
  • ANTH 213 - Culture in Contemporary Africa
  • ANTH 304 - History of Anthropological Thought
  • ANTH 316 - Anthropology of Religion and Ritual
  • ANTH 317 - Ethnographic Methods
  • ANTH 361 - Anthropology of Islam

Publications/Research Listings

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

2016 - Collapsed pluralities: Islamic education, learning, and creativity in Niger. In Islamic Education in Africa: Writing Boards and Black Boards. (Launay, ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

2010 - Ritual exchange and the fourth obligation: Ancient Maya food offerings in caves and the flexible materiality of ritual (co-author with Chris Morehart). The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (incorporating Man) 16(3): 588-608.

2006a - Costs of knowledge: Some economic underpinnings of spiritual relations in Islam in Niger. Research in Economic Anthropology 24:309-328.

2006b - The materialization of magic: Islamic talisman in West Africa. In Studies in Witchcraft, Magic, War and Peace in Africa: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. (Nicolini, ed.). Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen. pp. 263-276.

Other Selected Publications

2012 - Jihad (Africa); Salt and Gold. In Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa (Orlando Patterson, ed.). Sage: Thousand Oaks, CA.

2010 - Cheikh Hamidou Kane. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought (Irele and Jeyifo, eds.). New York: Oxford University Press.

2008 - The Sahel; Niger; Whaling. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World (Stearns, ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2006 - Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831); Locke, John (1632-1704); Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873); Montesquieu, Charles, de Secondat, Baron de (1689-1755); Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1713-1778); Smith, Adam (1723-1790). In Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition (P. Hinks and J. McKivigan, eds.). Westport, CT: Greenwood.

2005 - The back-to-Africa movement. A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Thought in English (Poddar and Johnson, eds.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

2004 - Alexandreta; Refugees: Balkan Muslim; Turkish Script. In Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa (P. Mattar, ed.) 2nd ed. New York: MacMillan