William S. Sax was born in a small town in eastern Washington State, studied in Seattle, Wisconsin, and India, and earned his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1987. He has taught at Harvard University, the University of Canterbury in New Zealand (where he lived for eleven years), and Germany, where he has been Professor of Anthropology at Heidelberg University's South Asia Institute since 2000. Altogether he has spent about fifteen years in India, and produced three monographs, seven volumes of collected essays, and dozens of articles on theater, healing, ritual, mental health, spirit possession, and psychiatry in South Asia.