Research Statement
As a sociocultural anthropologist, my research spans three main areas: (1) small-scale agricultural development;
(2) political discourse, hegemony, and national identity; and (3) bureaucratic culture and technology as a cultural process.
My main research area is Latin America with an emphasis on Mexico, and I have also done work in the U.S. All of these interests have an applied focus, adopt a political-economic approach, center on various dimensions of socio-cultural change, and aspects of my work are increasingly concerned with addressing policy related issues and situating anthropology as a policy-oriented discipline.
The core of my work since the mid-1980s has focused on small-scale agricultural development among primarily commercial family farmers in the State of Guanajuato. Over the past five years, I have expanded this work into the northwestern highlands of the neighboring state of Michoac‡n where work has examined the political economy of the local dairy-based ranchero society through the concept of ãmilk quality.ä This approach allowed for a detailed examination of both the clash as well as the accommodations being made between local peasant culture, practices, and organizational forms with outside forces (i.e., large commercial dairies and government officials) exhorting farmers to adopt a new notion of milk quality in order to be more competitive in a rapidly globalizing market. As a result, local farming culture was undergoing rapid transformation. In addition to research on globalization and agrarian change, I have also examined the changing nature of Mexican politics since its was first challenged at the presidential level in 1988. I have explored the changing nature of the use of symbol and myth in Mexican political discourse and how this relates to issues of state power and hegemony, as well as to national identity. Finally, I have worked in the area of anthropology and education in the U.S. Here my interest centered on the use of distance learning in higher education, a byproduct of teaching and coordinating an educational computer conferencing system in a community college system. This experience led to an interest in the political and policy implications of technology, the analysis of technology as a cultural process, and the ethnography of bureaucracy.
Teaching Statement
The UTSA Anthropology Program has a committed four-field orientation at the undergraduate level and this philosophy carries over to the graduate program as well. The undergraduate curriculum provides students with the basic core knowledge of the field, which is critical for students who either receive their B.A. as a terminal degree, and it is especially important to those going on to graduate programs in which they will be required to have intellectual literacy in the four subdisciplines. I bring an applied orientation to my courses and seek to offer a range of "core knowledge" courses at the undergraduate level (e.g., Introduction to Anthropology; Language, Thought, & Culture; Political & Legal Anthropology; Applied Anthropology; Social and Cultural Change). I also teach two area courses on Mesoamerica, one of which looks at the culture history of the region and the other of which examines contemporary social issues in Mexico. I have also offered a course on the anthropology of business and am developing a course on food and culture. At the graduate level, I have developed two methodologically oriented courses & Research Design & Proposal Writing and Field Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology. Both courses are intended to help students design and carry out successful thesis research and analysis. The former course is constructed to be salient to both cultural anthropology and archaeology students, a reflection of my own broad four-field training. The latter course is designed specifically with cultural anthropology students in mind so that they can develop their interviewing and observational skills. I would also like to offer a seminar in economic anthropology that would bridge that gap between archaeological and cultural anthropology interests, as well as a course on the ethnography of Mesoamerica. |
