Michel Verdon is a retired professor of anthropology from the Université de Montréal. He did his Ph.D. in social anthropology at Cambridge University and concentrated on West Africa, doing a fieldwork among the Ewe of Ghana. He also did fieldwork in rural Quebec and equally specialized in European ethnology. He taught at Cambridge University from 1979 to 1984, before moving to Montreal. He has written two ethnographies and four theoretical books on social anthropology, historical demography and economics.