There is no easy way to describe Bradford Keeney. You could call him an all-American shaman, the Marco Polo of psychology, an anthropologist of the spirit, but I usually just say he’s the guy with the best job in the world.

Keeney flinches a bit at being labeled a shaman, even though he was trained as a medicine man by elders of the Bushman people in Africa’s Kalahari desert. The son and grandson of Baptist preachers from Missouri, he’s careful about claiming the mantle of one of the world’s oldest spiritual traditions. And he’s adamant about not being any kind of Carlos Castaneda–style purveyor of ancient powers.

He’s nearly as uncomfortable being called a psychologist, even though he earned a Ph.D., taught at universities and institutes for 28 years, and has written books on the subject that have been translated into seven languages. But Keeney was always something of a renegade in the field, drawing ideas from theater and religious services more than from Freud and Alfred Adler.

The anthropologist label doesn’t fit either, even though he spends many months each year in Africa, the Amazon, the Caribbean, and American Indian reservations visiting local people and studying their traditions of healing. He doesn’t operate at all like academically trained anthropologists. Instead of sitting back to observe the people he meets, Keeney plunges right in, often spending his first night in a village dancing around a bonfire till dawn.

Keeney believes passionately that there is much we can learn from the planet’s most overlooked cultures. His job as vice president for cultural affairs of the Philadelphia-based Ringing Rocks Foundation (www.ringingrocks.org) is to visit remote communities, take part in their celebrations and daily lives, help them in struggles to keep their cultures vital, and bring back to the modern world information and inspiration on how we might live with more health, more happiness, and more soul.

“It’s like being a mystical reporter,” he says. “Or a spiritual detective. You go out and meet all these truly amazing people, and then come home to tell the stories.”

It is by no means easy work or a simple life. Scorpion bites and tropical fevers are part of the job description. He’s been questioned for kidnapping by suspicious authorities in Paraguay and dodged gunfire from midnight intruders at a home where he was staying in South Africa. He is on the road up to 10 months every year. He conducts business and composes his Profiles of Healing books (see sidebar) primarily in airport lounges.

Yet Keeney, 52, considers himself blessed for this chance to sit at the feet of people he thinks are some of the wisest on the planet. “I’ve spent most of my life in universities and now I am learning lessons from people who can’t even read,” he says “It is remarkable to hear how these old shamans see everything in relationship. They see health in context with the rest of a person’s life, the family, and the community. And people are seen in context with everything else in the world. This is not primitive thinking but a very sophisticated worldview.”