Professor Maurice Bloch was trained at both the London School of Economics and Cambridge University. He has carried out fieldwork among irrigated rice cultivators and shifting agriculturalists in Madagascar, and in other parts of the world including Japan. Partly because of his French background he has combined British and French approaches and was instrumental in introducing the revival in French Marxist theory to British anthropologists. His interests have focused on the notion of ideology and he has written on ritual and language. He is now working on how to relate the findings of cognitive psychology with anthropology. Maurice Bloch has taught in the USA, France, and Sweden and is a Fellow of the British Academy.