Dr. Peter Skafish is a sociocultural anthropologist who works between his discipline and philosophy on how ideas, cosmologies, and translation shape the diversity of human thought and experience. He is currently engaged in research that employs anthropological perspectives on pluralism, cosmology, modernity and religion to anticipate how the sort of nonhuman beings that we imagine to design UAP might think, and in what ways this thinking is likely to be both commensurate and incommensurate with our own. Dr. Skafish is also developing in his advisory research for Sol broad recommendations for a genuinely democratic, “whole of society” approach to solving the legal, political, and environmental problems raised by UAP.

Dr. Skafish has a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and has held faculty and research positions in the United States, France, Canada, and Germany, including at universities such as UC Berkeley, the Collège de France, McGill University, and the Bauhaus-University, Weimar. He also has been the recipient of funding from such organizations as the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Humanities, and the Fondation Fyssen. He is the author of the book Rough Metaphysics: The Speculative Thought and Mediumship of Jane Roberts, which was judged “absolutely original” for “its vast expansion of the scope and possibility of the discipline of anthropology,” and he is currently a completing a book on US government data on UAP. He is also the coeditor of the volume Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology after Anthropology, which contains essays by, among others, Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, and Marilyn Strathern, and the translator of three French-language books, including Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics and the philosopher Catherine Malabou’s The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy. He has published in such journals as Angelaki, Common Knowledge, and Qui Parle, where he served as editor-in-chief, and is also developing the Institute of Speculative and Critical Inquiry, an alternative center of research that maintains collaborations with institutions like the Serralves Museum, in Porto.  

With Garry Nolan, Dr. Skafish is a founder of Sol and integral to its vision. He welcomes messages from people who have experienced UAP encounters.