Margaret ("Margie") Buckner was born and raised in Oceanside, California.  During her senior year of high school she was an AFS exchange student in Argentina, where she learned to speak Spanish.  She started college at Palomar College, then transfered to San Diego State University, where she received a B.A in anthropology and in linguistics in 1978.  In her junior year, she spent almost a year traveling around South America, and learned Portuguese in Brazil.

Margaret later earned a teacher credential in bilingual education at San Diego State with the intent of teaching in California schools, but joined the Peace Corps instead.  She was stationed in Bangassou, Central African Republic, where she taught English and Spanish for three years.  During her time there, she made forays into the countryside to learn the Zande and Sango languages.  There she met Professor Eric de Dampierre, a French ethnologist studying a neighboring group, the Nzakara.  Professor de Dampierre persuaded Margaret to go to the University of Paris X (Nanterre) for graduate study in ethnology.

Margaret wrote an M.A. thesis on the use of body part terms in Zande, and a Ph.D. dissertation on Zande chantfables (1993).  She was elected as a member of a French research laboratory, the Laboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociologie comparative, and continues to participate in it.   She was also invited to organize and catalog the Zande (a.k.a. Azande) materials in the Evans-Pritchard archives at Oxford University.

While finishing her dissertation, Margaret was hired by the Medical Research Council of London to manage an HIV research center in Guinea-Bissau, which she did from 1991-1993.  This enabled her to carry out significant research on the Manjako, particularly the subjects of kinship, prostitution, and HIV, as well as learn the Manjako language and the Portuguese Creole of Guinea-Bissau.

Dr. Buckner came to Missouri State in 1997.  She is particularly interested in African cultures, linguistics, ethnomusicology, and medical anthropology.  She teaches ANT 100 World Cultures, ANT 280 Linguistic Anthropology,  ANT 330 Peoples and Cultures of Africa, and ANT 380 Language and Culture, and ANT 510 Ethnographic Research Methods.  She is also the principal author of our anthropology web-page and organizes our annual student conference.  She has started two new local research projects:  Mexican immigrants in the Springfield area, and Quapaw language preservation.  She has taken students to Guinea Bissau (West Africa) and to San Luis Potosi, Mexico.