Professor Graburn was educated in Classics at King's, Canterbury and Natural Sciences and Anthropology at Cambridge, McGill, and University of Chicago. He has carried out ethnographic research with the Inuit and Naskapi of Canada, Alaska and Greenland since 1959, in Japan since 1974, and China since 1991.
Professor Graburn has taught at Berkeley since 1964, with visiting appointments at the National Museum of Civilization, Ottawa; the Centre des Hautes Études Touristiques, Aix-en-Provence; the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka; the Research Center for Korean Studies, Kyushu National University, Fukuoka; the International Institute for Culture, Tourism and Development, London Metropolitan University; the UF Rio Grande del Sol, Porto Alegre, Brazil; and has lectured at twenty-four Chinese universities.
At Berkeley, he teaches a seminar on Tourism, Art and Modernity (since 1977) and is the co-chair of the Tourism Studies Working Group. His recent research has focused on the study of art, tourism, museums, and the expression and representation of identity. He is now working on contemporary tourism in Asia (Japan and China). He is also continuing his research on contemporary Inuit arts, including "urban Inuit arts", and works with the Canadian Inuit cultural organization, Avataq, in Nouveau Québec, and Inuit institutions in Iqaluit, Nunavut, on aspects of cultural preservation and autonomy.
