Cultural anthropologist Eric Crystal has been working in village Southeast Asia for over three decades. In l966 Dr. Crystal embarked upon his first professional trip to Southeast Asia as USAID Student Intern in the central highlands of South Vietnam. There he spent several months as a volunteer working on education and refugee relief programs for tribal, highland refugees fleeing the developing conflict. He subsequently earned his Ph.D on the basis of intensive research with Toraja highlanders on the eastern Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Fluent in the Indonesian national language, he subsequently served as a translator for the U.S. Department of State.

He has participated in numerous development missions in outer island Indonesia, contributing his anthropological expertise to projects funded by the United States Agency for International Development, the Canadian International Development Agency and World University Service of Canada. An accomplished photographer, his still photographs have appeared at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C, at the San Francisco International Airport and at numerous anthropological exhibits at Berkeley and at UCLA.

Dr. Crystal has worked closely with Laotian and Cambodian refugee communities in California.  During the l983-83 academic year he served as director of the N.E. H. funded "Indochinese Communities of California" project. This project involved field research in California central valley communities such as Merced and Stockton which had been significantly impacted by large refugee migrations during the previous four years.

Dr. Crystal served as Vice-Chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at the University of California at Berkeley from l984 until his retirement in 2000. During his tenure at Berkeley he participated in initial University of California contacts with Hanoi University.  In l993 he was asked to lead a World Affairs Council of Northern California study tour to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The Regents of the University of California selected Dr. Crystal to direct the first undergraduate student exchange program of any major American university in post-war Vietnam (at Hanoi University). The historic significance of this program was noted in November 2000 in a public address by President Clinton during his visit to Hanoi .

Since his retirement at the millennium Dr. Crystal has continued to teach part time for the Group in Asian Studies at Berkeley and at the San Francisco Art Institute. He received funding to organize three field trips in Vietnam in collaboration with the national Museum of Ethnology as part of the "Art of Rice" exhibit which opened at UCLA in April, 2004. He has worked closely with Peter Whittlesey of the Grant Union High School District on the preparation of digital instructional materials relating to Southeast Asia for California teachers. Their joint article on the "The Role of Rice in Southeast Asia" was published in the journal Education About Asia in March 2005.