Raffles grew up in London, England, and moved to New York in the early 1990s. He lives in Manhattan and teaches at The New School.

Raffles was the recipient of the 2003 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award for In Amazonia: A Natural History.

In 2009, he was awarded a Whiting Writers' Award.

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Philip Hoare described Raffles' Insectopedia as "impossible to categorize, wildly allusive and always stimulating."

Articles

• " Sweet Honey on the Block," The New York Times, Op-Ed, July 7, 2010.
• "A Conjoined Fate," Orion (2010).
• "Cricket Fighting," in Adam Gopnik ed., The Best American Essays (2008).
• "Jews, Lice, and History," Public Culture (2007).
• "Towards a Critical Natural History," Antipode (2005).
• "Jungle" in Patterned Ground: Ecologies of Nature and Culture, ed. Stephan Harrison, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift (2004).
• "Further Reflections on Amazonian Environmental History: Transformations of Rivers and Streams," (with Antoinette WinklerPrins), Latin American Research Review (2003).
• "Intimate Knowledge," International Social Science Journal (2002), reprinted in .

Books