For anthropologists and social scientists working in North and South America, the past few decades have brought considerable change as issues such as repatriation, cultural jurisdiction, and revitalization movements have swept across the hemisphere. Today scholars are rethinking both how and why they study culture as they gain a new appreciation for the impact they have on the people they study. Key to this reassessment of the social sciences is a rethinking of the concept of borders: not only between cultures and nations but between disciplines such as archaeology and cultural anthropology, between past and present, and between anthropologists and indigenous peoples.
Border Crossings
is a collection of fourteen essays about the evolving focus and perspective of anthropologists and the anthropology of North and South America over the past two decades. For a growing number of researchers, the realities of working in the Americas have changed the distinctions between being a “Latin,” “North,” or “Native” Americanist as these researchers turn their interests and expertise simultaneously homeward and out across the globe.
Kathleen S. Fine-Dare is a professor of anthropology and gender/women’s studies and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. She is the author of
Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA
(Nebraska 2002). Steven L. Rubenstein (1962-2012) was the director of the Research Institute of Latin American Studies and a reader in Latin American anthropology in the School of Cultures, Languages, and Area Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of
Alejandro Tsakimp: A Shuar Healer in the Margins of History
(Nebraska 2002).
Contributors: Barbara Burton, Les W. Field, Kathleen S. Fine-Dare, Sarah Gammage, Lêda Leitão Martins, Peter McCormick, John M. Norvell, David L. Nugent, Steven L. Rubenstein, Enrique Salmón, Jean N. Scandlyn, Linda J. Seligmann, and James A. Zeidle