Bambi B. Schieffelin (born April 26, 1945) is a linguistic anthropologist and professor emerita at New York University (NYU) in the department of Anthropology.
Her 1979 Columbia PhD dissertation is entitled, "How Kaluli Children Learn What to Say, What to Do,and How to Feel: An Ethnographic Study of the Development of Communicative Competence.
[6] Several other faculty members (including William Labov, Lila R. Gleitman, Fred L. Block, and Frank Furstenberg) severed ties with the School of Education to protest her tenure denial, citing her "international reputation" and "work... of the highest quality".
She has carried out extensive fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, often in collaboration with ethnomusicologist Steven Feld.
[8][9] She has published on the linguistic aspects evidentiality, focusing on how children learn culturally appropriate ways of referencing sources of knowledge.