Weston La Barre is best known for his work in anthropology and ethnography, in which he drew on the theories of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Born in Uniontown, PA, La Barre studied at Princeton and Yale, and later taught at Rutgers, Wisconsin and Duke universities. La Barre conducted field work across North and South America, and later through India, China, Africa and Europe. He studied the Plains Indians and their peyote cult with Richard Evans Schultes (which resulted in the 1938 book The Peyote Cult).

La Barre's masterwork is The Ghost Dance: The Origin of Religion (1970), which draws together his explorations of shamanism, world religion, Native American culture, altered states of consciousness and the use of drugs in belief systems.

Works:
The Peyote Cult
The Aymara Indians of the Lake Titicaca Plateau
The Human Animal
Materia Medica of the Aymara
They Shall Take up Serpents: Psychology of the Southern Snakehandling Cult
Shadow of Childhood: Neoteny and the Biology of Religion
The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion
Culture in Context, Selected Writings of Weston La Barre
Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition About Sexuality