Faculty
Dr. Tod Swanson grew up in eastern Ecuador as the son of missionary parents. He received a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago. He has written various articles on the history of indigenous religion in North and South America including "Refusing to Drink with the Mountains: Traditional Andean Meanings in Evangelical Testimonies" in Martin Marty, ed., Accounting for Fundamentalism: The Dynamic Character of Fundamentalist Movements (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 79-98), "An Ungodly Resemblance: Colonial Violence and Inca Analogies to Christianity" in Theophus H. Smith and Mark I. Wallace, eds., Curing Violence: Religion and the Thought of Rene Girard (Sonoma: Polbridge Press, 1994, pp. 103-108), and "Weathered Characters: Envy and Response to the Seasons in North and South American Indian Morality" in the Journal of Religious Ethics (92 [1992]: pp. 601-630).
Dr. Swanson is Associate Professor with the Department of Religious Studies both at Arizona State University. During the summer months, he returns with his family to his wife's home community in the Napo Province of Ecuador where they are working with rain forest management techniques on land owned by the Quichua community.
Kathleen DeWalt is Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and co-author of the book, A Cultural Feast: An Introduction to Food and Society. She is also a distinguished guest of the field school and deliver two lectures on: "Food Systems of Ecuador" and "Ethnographic Data Collection in Rural Communities in Ecuador."
Juan Celidonia Ruiz Macedo, Ethnobotany Instructor, is Curator of the AMAZ Herbarium of the Universidad Nacional de la Amazinia Peruana in Iquitos Peru. He has participated in many botanical expeditions including the seminal expeditions of Dr. Alan Gentry in the Napo area. In addition he has worked on the categorization of the plants of the Reserva del Güepi in the Peruvian Amazon.
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Edward Gilbert first became interested in South America as a member of the Peace Corps in 1997. During his service, he lived and worked in a Quichua community in the Bolivian Andes as a Soil Conversation / Environmental Education volunteer. His experiences in this ecologically and culturally diverse region instilled a strong appreciation for South America. Shortly after Bolivia, he joined the Plant Biology graduate program at Arizona State University where he obtained his M.S. degree in December 2002. Through his work with ASU, he again returned several times to Latin America as part of academic teams to collect and study the tropical flora in both Costa Rica and Ecuador.
Currently, he teaches the Neotropical Plant Biology course and co-teaches the the Amazonian Ethnobotany course with David Kiefer during the Field School's Summer Program. During the remainder of the academic year, he is employed as the Assistant Curator / Database Manager for the University of Arizona herbarium. One of his major interests is using advances in data and network technology to aid flora research and identification. He believes that such tools have an enormous potential in overcoming the many challenges associated with studying in the biologically diversity areas such as the Ecuadorian tropics.
David Kiefer, M.D., who will be teaching the Amazonian Ethnobotany course with Edward Gilbert, is a board-certified family physician and a recent graduate of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, a training program founded by Dr. Andrew Weil. Dr. Kiefer graduated from the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison, Wisconsin, which is also where he completed a bachelor’s degree in zoology along with additional training in environmental studies and conservation biology. He completed his family medicine residency at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, working primarily in a community clinic offering family practice mixed with some complementary modalities (acupuncture, naturopathic medicine) to low-income and Spanish-speaking patients.
Dr. Kiefer has been involved in research and work activities in Latin America since 1990, including projects in Costa Rica (agroecology, rainforest conservation), Mexico (anthropology), Ecuador (ethnobotany), and Peru (rainforest biology). Currently, most of Dr. Kiefer’s teaching and research activities have been in the areas of herbal medicine and ethnobotany. He has given lectures for Bastyr University (a naturopathic medical school outside of Seattle, Washington), the University of Arizona, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on a variety of topics from international health and herbal medicine to shamanism and evidence-based medicine. His most recent publication was a review of Panax ginseng, the popular herbal tonic, for American Family Physician, a leading family medicine journal.
Nina Kinti-Moss will be joining the field school to teach Quichua. Ms. Kinti-Moss holds a master's degree in social work from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She has taught Quichua at the University of Kansas since 1997, and has authored many educational texts in that language. She is co-author of the article, "A Pan-Indigenous Vision of Indigenous Studies," which appeared in the Spring 2000 edition of the Indigenous Nations Study Journal.
In addition to teaching, Ms. Kinti-Moss is the founder, designer, and weaver with First Weavers of the Americas in her home village of Salasaca, Ecuador. This effort has elevated the quality of Salasacan weaving and increased the earnings of skilled Quichua weavers, thereby improving the quality of life in Salasaca.
Armando Muyulema returns to the field school for his second year to teach Quichua. He currently teaches Quichua at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mr. Muyulema holds a Master's degree from the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar and will complete his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh in September, 2004.
Mr. Muyulema is the author of many scholarly works on indigenous identity and a children's dictionary in Quichua and has presented at conferences throughout North and South America on the same topics.
Dr. Michael Uzendoski first went to Ecuador in 1993 and since 1994 has worked with Amazon Quichua speakers of the Upper Napo. He spent years learning and studying Quichua and has found that Amazonian Quichua is a rich and poetic language. One constant in his research has been to find ways to document and translate the poetics of Amazonian Quichua verbal and narrative life. He is also drawn to social theory. In other projects, he has thought through the nature of Napo Runa notions of the "social" and sociality as connected to convivial states and the inseparability of the imaginary and material realms. While in the field, he has become very aware that everyday assumptions that seemed matter-of-fact to him (like the idea of a "thing," a person, a plant, or "substance" itself) mean different things when one moves from Western to Amazonian social contexts. These subtle everyday differences make the task of writing ethnography problematic, so Dr. Uzendoski has experimented with humanistic forms of writing that convey the complexity of these experiential issues. A current writing project explores how value among the Napo Runa is infused by Amazonian cosmology and the metamorphosis of rainforest spirits and substances into human relations. His research and teaching continually emphasizes that human worlds are defined by substances that elicit the imagination. Consequently, the metamorphoses of social relations moves between the physical and imaginary realms.
During the academic year, Dr. Uzendoski, is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Florida State University where he teaches courses on economic anthropology, peoples and cultures of Amazonia, symbol and ritual, and the conquest of the Americas. He received his masters and his doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Viriginia and was awarded a Fulbright to lecture and research in Ecuador in 2002.
Norman Whitten, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and distinguished guest of the field school, will deliver a lecture on the Amazonian Quichua at the field school. Dr. Whitten began his field research in Ecuador in 1961 with Afro-Esmeraldians and has conducted field research with Afro-Colombians, indigenous people of Columbia and Peru. He has also worked with the Canelos Quichua. He is the author of Sacha Runa: Ethnicity and Adaptation of Ecuadorian Jungle Quichua; Sicuanga Runa: The Other Side of Development in Amazonian Ecuador; and co-author of From Myth to Creation: Art from Ecuadorian Ecuador.
