ANDES AND AMAZON

Director Tod Swanson , Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University is a specialist in Amazonian Quichua language and culture. After graduating from high school in Quito he received a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago. His current research focuses on indigenous religious approaches to nature. His most recent article on this topic is “Singing to Estranged Lovers: Runa Relations to Plants in the Ecuadorian Amazon,” Journal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture 3:1 (2009) 36-65. Swanson, who directed ArizonaState University’s Center for Latin American Studies

(a National Resource Center under Title VI) from 2000-2007, is an administrator who seeks to foster collaborative interdisciplinary work on the Ecuadorian Amazon. He is particularly interested in the implications of indigenous religious culture for practical issues such as the sustainability of the Amazonian environment, community governance, health, development, and indigenous language preservation. Between 2004 and 2006 he collaborated with ASU’s Center for Indian Education to co-direct a post B.A training program for indigenous language bilingual school teachers from Mexico funded by USAID. Swanson currently manages a 600 hectare Amazonian forest preserve and botanical garden. He and his wife Josefina are active members of Comunidad Santu Urcu, a Napo Quichua community in eastern Ecuador where they maintain a family home.

Dr. Dennis McKenna is an ethnobotanist specializing in ayahuasca and other psychoactive plants of the Amazonian region. Dr. Mckenna earned his doctorate of botanical sciences at the University of British Columbia in 1984. Since that time he served as the Director of Ethnopharmacology at Shaman Pharmaceuticals and as senior research pharmacognosist for Aveda Corporation in Minneapolis, Minn. McKenna is currently affiliated with the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. He serves on the Advisory Board of the American Botanical Council and is the author or co-author of more than 35 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals.

Dr. Timothy Smith, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Appalachia State University. His teaching in the Field School focuses on Ecuadorian indigenous politics and governance in comparison to Guatemala and other regions of Latin America. Smith received a BA in Latin American Studies and a BS in Anthropology from Tulane University. He received a PhD in Anthropology from the University at Albany, SUNY, where he worked under the direction of Gary Gossen and Robert Carmack. Currently, he is completing a book on the cultural legacy, history, and leadership of the Kaqchikel Maya of Sololá, Guatemala from 1490-2003, which focuses on intra-

on Ideophany Dialogue and Perspective, is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press.

Ingeniero Forestal Juan Celidonia Ruiz Macedo, a specialist in Amazonian plant taxonomy, is a curator of the AMAZ Herbarium of the Universidad Nacional de la Amazonia 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.

communal struggles over representation and identity formation under colonial rulend in the post-colonial/post-war era. He is the editor (with Walter Little) of Mayas in Post-War Guatemala: Harvest of Violence Revisited. University of Alabama Press, May 2009.

Dr. Janis B. Nuckolls is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University. She is the author of Sounds Like Life: Sound Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quichua. Her work on onomatopoetic ideophones in Amazonian Quichua has opened a whole new window on the Amazonian philosophy of nature. By focusing on aspects of Quichua grammar and semantics that are not easily explained within the frameworks of Chomskyan or structural linguistics her work also offers an opportunity to rethink the way human language works from the perspective of an Amazonian llanguage. Her new book, Lessons from a Quechua StrongWoman

evaluate alternative choices in water conservation and their impact on residential water demand. Internationally, her work has involved classifying land cover change for New Delhi, India and modeling the movement of Costa Rica primates. Her work on Costa Rican primates evolved from GIS and mapping work at the La Selva Biological Station, a well known reserve and study site for tropical forest in the Americas.

Kathleen Harrison, ethnobotanist, teaches about the history of the relationship between plants and human cultures. For over thirty years she has examined the folk uses of plants and mushrooms in ritual, art, medicine, materials and food, with a special emphasis on the beliefs and practices that illustrate indigenous peoples’ recognition of nature. With her colleague Dennis McKenna, she teaches annual ethnobotany field courses in Hawaii, for the University of Minnesota. She has taught as well for the California School of Herbal Studies, Sonoma State University, and various other academic programs.
Kathleen has over thirty years of recurrent fieldwork experience in Latin

America and has helped establish ethnobotanical teaching gardens in Peru, Costa Rica and Hawaii. For fifteen years she has participated in a relationship with Mazatec indigenous healers and their families, in the mountains of Mexico. She is co-founder and director of Botanical Dimensions, a small non-profit organization that has supported ethnobotanical fieldwork and living plant collections in various countries since 1986, with a special focus on species used in shamanism.
She also does botanical illustration and enjoys helping people learn to see nature. Her home base is in rural Northern California, and she also lives part-time on the Big Island of Hawaii, where she helps steward native forest and a collection of tropical medicinal plants.

Erin O'Rourke is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Linguistics' Graduate Program in Hispanic Linguistics. Dr. O'Rourke's main areas of research include intonation and sociophonetic variation in Spanish and varieties of Quechua and Quichua. She received her PhD in Spanish from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is interested in the language contact phenomenon found between indigenous languages and Spanish. She has previously studied varieties of Peruvian and Bolivian Quechua, and joins the field school to expand her research to include Ecuadorian Quichua varieties as well.

Dr. Elizabeth Wentz, an Associate Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences at Arizona State University, provides expert direction for a team of Field School students mapping Amazonian rainforest on the South bank of the Rio Napo. Her research and teaching interests involve spatial analysis and geographic information systems, particularly as they relate to the urban and natural environment. Recent work has been associated with the Decision Center for Desert Cities (DCDC), where she is a member of the executive committee, to create an environmental spatial decision support system (ESDSS) to help policy-makers and the public

Faculty and Guest Lecturers from Previous Years

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."

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.