Professor Conklin is a cultural and medical anthropologist specializing in the ethnography of indigenous peoples of lowland South America (Amazonia). Her research focuses on the anthropology of the body, religion and ritual, health and healing, death and mourning, the politics of indigenous rights, and ecology, environmentalism, and cultural and religious responses to climate change. She teaches courses on anthropological theory, medicine and healing, indigenous peoples, and environmental issues. Her publications include Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society, "Body Paint, Feathers, and VCRs: Aesthetics and Authenticity in Amazonian Activism," "The Shifting Middle Ground: Brazilian Indians and Eco-Politics" (with Laura Graham), "Ski Masks, Nose Rings, Veils and Feathers: Body Arts on the Front Lines of Identity Politics," and "Environmentalism, Global Community, and the New Indigenism."
 

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DEMAREST, Arthur (Ph.D. 1981, Harvard)
Office phone: (615) 322-7524

Ingram Professor, Anthropology; Director, Vanderbilt Institute of Mesoamerican Archaeology; General Editor VIMA Monographs in Archaeology.

Professor Demarest’s interests, research, and publications are on the Maya, Olmec, Aztec, and Inca civilizations; PreColumbian religion, ritual, and ideology; the collapse of civilizations; anthropological and philosophical theory; indigenous rights and development; ethics. He is completing his twenty sixth field season as a project director in Central America, currently excavating the ancient Maya port city of Cancuen and exploring the sites along the ancient Maya trade routes. Professor Demarest’s publications include over a hundred articles and twenty books and monographs – most recently Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization (Cambridge 2004) and The Petexbatun Regional Archaeological Project: A Multidisciplinary Study of the Classic Maya Collapse (Vanderbilt 2006).

In recognition of his teaching and training of new Ph.D.’s in archaeology, Professor Demarest has received the Order of the Matt, Guatemala’s Archaeology Career Leadership Award, as well as an honorary doctorate from the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. In 2004, in recognition of his work in community development, archaeology, and education he was awarded the Orden Nacional del Patrimonio Cultural by the President of the Republic of Guatemala. His work in archaeology and development and the Vanderbilt regional system of Q’eqchi Maya community-managed archaeological sites and parks have been honored by awards and exhibitions in New York, Scandanavia, and Brazil. His archaeological discoveries have been covered this year in National Geographic (Aug 2007) and American Archaeology (Oct 2006) and Professor Demarest was recently profiled in Science (Sept 2006).

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DILLEHAY, Tom D. (Ph.D. 1976, University of Texas-Austin)

Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Professor Extraordinaire and Honorary Doctorate at the Universidad Austral de Chile. Professor Dillehay has carried out numerous archaeological and anthropological projects in Peru, Chile, Argentina and other South American countries and in the United States. His main interests are migration, the long-term transformative processes leading to political and economic change, and the interdisciplinary and historical methodologies designed to study those processes. He has been a Visiting Professor at several universities around the world, including the Universidad de Chile, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Cambridge University, University of Tokyo, University of Chicago, among others. Professor Dillehay has published fifteen books and more than two hundred refereed journal articles and books. He currently co-directs with the University of Chicago an interdisciplinary project focused on long-term human and environmental interaction on the north coast of Peru.  He has began an excavation project at Huaca Prieta, Peru.  He directs another project sponsored by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Science Foundation on the political identity of the Araucanians in Chile and Argentina. Professor Dillehay has received numerous international and national awards for his research, books and teaching.  Professor Dillehay is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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FISCHER, Edward F. (PhD 1996, Tulane University)

Dr. Fischer's research combines cultural anthropology and political economy with a geographical focus on highland Guatemala and Germany. His ongoing fieldwork is centered in the Kaqchikel town of Tecpán and he has also worked extensively with the leaders of Guatemala's pan-Maya movement. His books include Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala (co-edited with R. McKenna Brown), Cultural Logics and Global Economies: Maya Identity in Thought and Practice (A Choice Outstanding Academic Title), Tecpán Guatemala: A Modern Maya Town in Local and Global Context (co-authored with Carol Hendrickson), and Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala (co-authored with Peter Benson). His most recent research looked at consumer behavior, labor relations, and moral models in Germany. More information is available from his homepage.

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FOWLER, William R. (Ph.D. 1982, Calgary); Director of Undergraduate StudiesOffice phone: (615) 343-6123

Professor Fowler's current research focuses on the archaeology of the conquest period in Mesoamerica. Since 1996 he has directed excavations at Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador, the site of the first villa of San Salvador, founded in 1525 and abandoned in 1545. Although it was established as a Spanish-conquest city, San Salvador was principally occupied by Nahua-speaking Pipils of the region and Tlaxcallans from central Mexico who settled there as allies of the Spaniards. Through his research at Ciudad Vieja, Professor Fowler is exploring issues of culture contact and culture change during the first generation of the Conquest. He continues to explore his interests in the archaeology and ethnohistory of the pre-Columbian Pipils and other Nahua groups of Central America. His books include The Cultural Evolution of Ancient Nahua Civilizations, The Origins of Complex Society in Southeastern Mesoamerica, El Salvador: Antiguas Civilizaciones, Caluco: Arqueología e historia de un pueblo pipil en el siglo XVI, Investigaciones arqueológicas en Ciudad Vieja: La primigenia villa de San Salvador, and Arqueología histórica de la villa de San Salvador, El Salvador: Informe de las excavaciones (1996-2003). Since 1987 he has served as editor of the international journal Ancient Mesoamerica, published by Cambridge University Press.

Spring 2006 Faculty Feature

GREGOR, Thomas A. (Ph.D. 1969, Columbia)

Professor Gregor is interested in psychological anthropology, gender roles and sexuality, peace and aggression, psychoanalysis and culture, anthropological ethics, and native peoples of South America and anthropological film. He is the author of Mehinaku: The Drama of Daily Life in a Brazilian Indian Village and Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People. His edited books include A Natural History of Peace and The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence (coedited)and Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method (coedited). He has worked as a film maker for the BBC, Grenada Television and NET in making the television films Mehinaku, We are Mehinaku, Feathered Arrows and Dreams from the Forest. Professor Gregor recently conducted a field season among the Mehinaku focused on the system of peace that obtains in the region, culture change, and the degradation of the ecosystem due to the encroachment of Brazilian society. He is the co-author of a recent article on ethics and contemporary anthropology (American Anthropologist 2004) and he is currently completing a book on peaceful relations among tribes in Central Brazil. Professor Gregor, along with the Perls Foundation, is also assisting the Mehinaku in the production and merchandising of organic honey as part of an environmentally sustainable development project.

Fall 2006 Faculty Feature

JANUSEK, John W. (Ph.D 1994, University of Chicago)

Dr. Janusek is an archaeologist interested in the development of complex societies and cities in the South American Andes. His theoretical interests include: human agency/identity, power relations, urbanism, space and place, ritual practice, and household archaeology. He has worked in the Bolivian highlands since 1987, conducting research principally focused on Tiwanaku civilization and its precursors. He currently directs an interdisciplinary research project at the sites of Khonkho Wankane and Iruhito in the southern Lake Titicaca Basin (see http://antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/janusek/janusek.html). His publications include: Craft and Local Power (Latin American Antiquity 10, 1999), Out of Many, One (Latin American Antiquity 13, 2002), Tiwanaku and its Precursors (Journal of Archaeological Research 12, 2004), Household and City in Tiwanaku (in Andean Archaeology, Helaine Silverman ed., Blackwell 2004), five chapters in Tiwanaku and its Hinterland Vol. II (Alan Kolata ed., Smithsonian Institution, 2003), and The Changing ‘Nature’ of Tiwanaku Religion (World Archaeology 38, 2006). His two books are Identity and Power in the Ancient Andes (Routledge, 2004) and Ancient Tiwanaku (Cambridge, forthcoming in May, 2007).

ROMERO, Sergio F. (Ph.D. 2006, University of Pensylvania)

Sergio is a linguist interested in language variation and change, language and culture, and the documentation of Native American languages. He is particularly interested in Mayan languages and Central American varieties of Nahuatl. His dissertation was a variationist study of ongoing change in the grammar of K'ichee', a Mayan language spoken in the western highlands of Guatemala. His current research is on the rise of new dialects of Q’eqchi’ in the lowlands of Guatemala and Peten, and on language ideology and language change in K’iche’. His publications include “Nahuatl Historical Sources from Guatemala” (To be published in the Handbook of Middle American Indians) and “Palatalization and Stylistic Variation in K’iche’” (In review).

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ROSS, Norbert O. (Ph.D. 1998, Habilitation 2002, Univ. of Freiburg, Germany)
Office phone: (615) 322-6114

Dr. Ross's research focuses on several Maya groups in Chiapas, Yucatán (Mexico) and the Petén (Guatemala). His work targets issues of culture and cognition, children’s acquisition of cultural knowledge, as well as cultural change. Current projects (funded by NSF and NIH) deal with the domains of folkbiology, ethnomedicine and religion. Dr. Ross also conducts research among North-American populations, mainly Hispanics in the USA and Menominee Native Americans in Wisconsin. He teaches courses on Maya ethnography, Maya language (Tzotzil and Yukatec), Religion, Environmental Anthropology, and Research methods. Dr. Ross has a background in the cognitive sciences (Northwestern University) and is developing an “Anthropology of predicitive Models” to be used within participant observations. Publications include Culture and Cognition, Implications for Theory and Method, Sage Publication (2004); Culture and Resource Conflict, (with Doug Medin and Doug Cox, 2006); as well as an array of articles in the leading journals.
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SHAKOW, Miriam (Ph.D. 2008, Harvard)

Miriam Shakow is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in how people experience and analyze state transformations. Her dissertation was a study of recent municipal conflict in central Bolivia, in which she examined how Bolivians engaged the principles and rhetoric of free market policies, state decentralization reforms, and new leftist parties. She is particularly interested in connecting personal experience, such as indigenous middle class identities, with large-scale political change. Her new research focuses on the ways in which teenagers and young adults have become the objects of fear in Bolivia and throughout Latin America in the context of rising unemployment and rising crime. She is the author “Andean ‘Civil Society’ and Political Imaginaries in Central Bolivia” (in review).

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TUNG, Tiffiny A. (Ph.D. December 2003, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Dr. Tung is a bioarchaeologist who examines mummies and skeletons from archaeological contexts to evaluate the health and disease status of ancient populations from the Peruvian Andes. Her primary research focuses on the ‘bioarchaeology of imperialism’, which includes the study of paleopathology and violence-related trauma to elucidate the impact of imperialism on community health and lifeways and individual life histories. Her ongoing research in the Peruvian Andes examines how Wari imperial structures (AD 600 – 1000) affected, and were affected by, heartland and hinterland communities, documenting such things as diet and disease, migration patterns, body modification practices, rates of violence, and specific kinds of culturally mediated violence (e.g., warfare, ritual fighting, corporeal punishment, domestic violence).
Some of her articles include: “Dismembering Bodies for Display: A Bioarchaeological Study of Trophy Heads from the Wari Site of Conchopata, Peru” (American Jrnl of Physical Anthropology, 2008); “Trauma and Violence in the Wari Empire of the Peruvian Andes: Warfare, Raids, and Ritual Fights” (American Jrnl of Physical Anthropology, 2007);  “The Village of Beringa at the Periphery of the Wari Empire: A Site Overview and New Radiocarbon Dates” (Andean Past, Vol. 8); “Intermediate Elite Agency in the Wari Empire: The Bioarchaeological and Mortuary Evidence” (T. Tung and A. Cook) in the volume, “Intermediate Elites” (University of Arizona Press, 2006).  

Information about her other research projects, publications, and public outreach can be viewed at her homepage.

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WERNKE, Steven (Ph.D. 2003, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

 Dr. Wernke is an archaeologist and historical anthropologist with interests in community organization, landscape and land-use, and the transformation of religious forms and practices during prehispanic and colonial times in the Andean region of South America. Methodologically, his research analyzes archaeological and documentary data sources in a GIS-based spatial framework to examine how community and landscape mediate relationships between households and states. His current research explores the transition from Inka to Spanish rule during the earliest period of sustained interaction between Spanish clerics and provincial Andean communities through NSF-funded excavations in mission villages in the Colca valley of southern Peru. His recent publications include "Negotiating Community and Landscape in the Peruvian Andes: A Trans-Conquest View (American Anthropologist, 2007), "Analogy or Erasure? Dialectics of Religious Transformation in the Early Doctrinas of the Colca Valley, Peru." (International Journal of Historical Archaeology 2007), and “The Politics of Community and Inka Statecraft in the Colca Valley, Peru” (Latin American Antiquity, 2006).  He is currently completing a book entitled Andean Interfaces: An Archaeo-History of Community, State, and Landscape in the Peruvian Highlands.

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NETHERLY, Patricia (Ph.D. Cornell University, 1977)

Dr. Netherly’s research brings together archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnology to study the cultural development of societies in the Andes and Amazonia over time. Her theoretical interests include the socio-political organization and the political economy of archaic states with particular reference to the Andes, modalities of complexity in pre-state societies, the cultural ecology of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene in South America and well as in later periods. She has taught at the State University of New York, Fredonia and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. She directed two long-term research projects in Ecuador: the Proyecto Arqueológico Tahuin on the coast of El Oro province under the sponsorship of the Banco Central del Ecuador, and the Proyecto Arqueológico del Oriente in Ecuadorian Amazonia under the sponsorship of the Fundación Alexander von Humboldt in Quito where she was Executive Director. She has also co-directed the Proyecto Zaña-Niepos in Northern Peru. She has edited two books and published numerous articles. She is finishing a book on the political structure of the polities of the North Coast of Peru and has in hand a study of the archaeology of the Western Amazon. Her future field research will continue to address the problems which have engaged her in the past in a series of small, focused projects.

BARZ, Gregory (Ph.D. 1997, Brown University, M.A. 1992, University of Chicago)

Prof. Barz is associate professor of ethnomusicology and anthropology and the Recordings Review Editor for The World of Music. He currently focuses on HIV/AIDS and musical performances in Uganda. He is co-editor of Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (Oxford) and Mashindano! Competitive Music Performance in East Africa (Mkuki na Nyota). His books include Music in East Africa: The Performance of Tradition and Modernity (2004, Oxford) and Singing for Life: HIV/AIDS and Music in Uganda (2006, Routledge). Editions Rodopi (Amsterdam) published his ethnography of East African choral communities, Performing Religion: Negotiating Past and Present in Kwaya Music of Tanzania, in 2003. In 2007 he released a CD recording with Smithsonian Folkways called Singing for Life: Songs of Hope, Healing, and HIV/AIDS in Uganda. Most recently he was a Senior Research Fellow in the AIDS Research Program of the Fulbright Fellowship Program.

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GAY, Volney (Ph.D. Chicago)

Volney P. Gay is Professor of Religion, Professor of Psychiatry, and Professor of Anthropology. Professor Gay's research interests are in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the psychodynamic study of culture, the comparative history of religions, and the psychology of religion. He is author of Reading Freud: Neurosis, Psychology, Religion; Reading Jung: Science, Psychology, and Religion; Freud on Ritual; and Understanding the Occult. His most recent book, Freud on Sublimation: Reconsiderations, won the Heinz Hartmann Award from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

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JAUREGUI, Carlos A (Ph.D. 2001, University of Pittsburgh)

Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Anthropology. 

Professor Jáuregui’s book Canibalia (Córdoba, Spain, 2005: second revised edition: Vervuert 2008), winner of the Premio Casa de las Americas 2005, focuses on the historical redefinition and ideological values of cannibalism as a shifting cultural metaphor in constructing and contesting Latin American identities throughout various stages of its cultural history. Other publications include Theatre of Conquest: Carvajal’s Complaint of the Indians in the “Court of Death” (Pennsylvania State UP, 2008) and Querella de los indios en las “Cortes de la Muerte” (1557) (México: UNAM, 2002). He is co-editor of Colonialidad y crítica en América Latina. Bases para un debate (México: UDLA, 2007), Heterotropías: narrativas de identidad y alteridad latinoamericana (Pittsburgh: IILI, 2003), and Coloniality at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Duke UP--In press 2008) (FORD-LASA Special Projects Award, 2003). Most recently, Dr. Jauregui co-authored and coedited with Joseph S. Mella and Edward F. Fischer Of Rage and Redemption: The Art of Oswaldo Guayasamín (Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, 2008), the art catalog for the Oswaldo Guayasamin Art Exhibit and National Tour 2008-2009

His articles have appeared in journals such as Colonial Latin American Review, Revista Ibeoramericana, Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, Hispanic Issues, Bulletin of the Comediantes, Humboldt (Goethe Institut), Enunciación, Revista Casa Silva, and Revista de Estudios Colombianos.

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 SHUBHRA, Sharma (Ph.D. 2005, University of Texas at Austin)

Associate Director and Senior Lecturer, Women's and Gender Studies Program

I have a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology with specialization in South Asia (University of Texas at Austin, December 2005), concentration in Women's and Gender Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and two Master's degrees in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India. My book project is about state supported education programs for adult women in rural communities in India. I am interested in an ethnography of the state-one that critically examines the projects through which state power is re-inscribed in social imagination and in spatial terms, in the context of globalization. My current research proposal, however, is about Indian diaspora communities in Canada. I am interested in transnational imaginings of the community and nation, specifically regarding its discursive aspect. As such, I seek to identify and represent both transnational/ global and localized practices and meanings of India and Indians in the 21st century.

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SPORES, Ronald (Ph.D. Harvard)
Professor Emeritus. Ethnohistory and archaeology, Mesoamerica (Central Mexico, Oaxaca), culture history, development and government and law. Author of The Mixtec Kings and Their People, The Mixtecs in Ancient and Colonial Times, Law and Politics in Central Mexico (editor).