Marlene Dobkin de Rios

Marlene Dobkin de Rios FRAI (April 12, 1939 – November 10, 2012) was an American cultural anthropologist, medical anthropologist, and psychotherapist. She conducted fieldwork in the Amazon for almost 30 years. Her research included the use of entheogenic plants by the indigenous peoples of Peru. 

Dobkin de Rios completed a bachelor's degree in clinical psychology at Queens College, City University of New York, in 1959. In 1963, Dobkin de Rios earned an M.A. in anthropology from New York University. She researched gender issues, including the social aspects of purdah in Turkey and the French colonial empire's policies impacting women in French West Africa.

She conducted doctoral research on the Preclassic Maya's use of psychoactive plants. In 1972, she earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation was titled The Use of Hallucinogenic Substances in Peruvian Amazonian Folk Healing.

In 1972, Dobkin de Rios became a tenured professor of cultural anthropology at California State University, Fullerton. She taught at Fullerton from 1969 until her retirement in 2000. Dobkin de Rios led fieldwork in the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon for almost thirty years. Her research included the use of entheogenic plants by the indigenous peoples of Peru.

From 1999 to 2000, Dobkin de Rios directed the qualitative dimension of research on ayahuasca use among adolescents within the União do Vegetal in Brazil.

Dobkin de Rios was a fellow of the American Anthropological Association and the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. She served as president of the Ethnopharmacology Society (1979-1981) and the Southwestern Anthropological Association (1979-1980).