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Alverson, Hoyt

Alverson6047 Silsby Hall
Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: 603-646-3336
Fax: 603-646-1140
hoyt.s.alverson at dartmouth.edu

My Baccalaureate is in Anthropology and Linguistics, George Washington University, 1964, and doctorate in Anthropology (Yale University, 1968). My teaching covers introductory courses in all sub-fields of anthropology and linguistics and advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in cognitive, economic and linguistic anthropology.

My two books are Mind in the Heart of Darkness, Yale, 1978, and Semantics and Experience, Johns Hopkins, 1994. Other writing includes articles, monographs, and book chapters in several areas of cultural anthropology and in cognitive linguistics. Mind in the Heart of Darkness won both the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association and First Prize in the University of Chicago Folklore Competition, 1979.

My ethnographic field research has been conducted in both urban and rural settings in southern Africa and in North America, supported at different times by grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

I have undertaken considerable consultation employment applying cultural anthropology in both the public and private sector under contract for the United States Peace Corps, U.S. AID, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Government of the Republic of Botswana, the United States Department of the Treasury, the Panama Canal Commission, Control Data, IBM, General Reinsurance Corp., Southern New England Telephone Co., Texaco, Inc., and L.L. Bean, Inc.

My most recent research and writing is based in the New Hampsire-Dartmouth Psychiatric Research Center and has focused on delivery of mental health and employment services among Euro-American, African-American, and Hispanic/Latino American populations of urban areas, especially inner cities of the Northeastern United States. I am currently analyzing and writing up data from a two year ethnographic study conducted in inner city Hartford, Connecticut of programs designed to secure employment for people diagnosed with severe mental illness.

Recent major publications include:

  • 1991 (with S. Rosenberg) "Discourse Analysis of Schizophrenic Speech: A Critique and Counterproposal" in Applied Psycholinguistcs, 11(2):167-184.
  • 1991 "Metaphor and Experience: Looking Over the Notion of Image Schema" in Beyond Metaphor: Trope Theory in Anthropology, J.W. Fernandez, (ed.). Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, pp. 94-120.
  • 1994 Semantics and Experience: Universal Metaphors of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho. Johns Hopkins University Press
  • 1996 "Cross-Language Universals in the Experience of Time: Collocational Evidence in English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho" in Dimensions of Time and Life, Vol VIII. J.T. Fraser and Margaret Soulsby, (eds.) Madison, CT: International Universities Press, pp.105 - 120.
  • 1997 Review Essay: Geoffrey J. Huck and John A. Goldsmith. Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates. Modern Language Notes, Vol. 112, pp. 698-702.
  • 1998 (with Eduardo Vicente) "An Ethnographic Study of Vocational Rehabilitation for Puerto Rican Americans with Severe Mental Illness". Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 69-72.
  • 1998 (with Marianne Alverson, Robert E. Drake and Deborah R. Becker). "Social Correlates of Competitive Employment among People with Severe Mental Illness". Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp.31-39
  • 2000 (with Marianne Alverson, Robert E. Drake). "An Ethnographic Study of the Longitudinal Course of Substance Abuse among People with Severe Illness" Community Mental Health Journal 36(6): 557-569.
  • 2001 "From Storied Time to Clock Time in the Economic Globalization of the New Millennium" In Time at the Millenium: Changes and Continuities, (The Study of Time, Vol X.) M. Soulsby and J.T. Frazer, eds. Westport: Bergin and Garvey, pp. 177 - 188.
  • 2001 (with Marianne Alverson, Robert E. Drake). "Social Patterns of Substance-Use Among People with Dual Diagnoses". Mental Health Services Research 3(1): 3 -14.
  • 2002 Robert E. Drake, Michael Wallach, Hoyt Alverson, Kim Mueser. "Psychosocial Aspects of Substance Abuse by Clients with Severe Mental Illness". Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 190(2): 100-106.
  • 2005 (with Marianne Alverson, Robert E. Drake) "Social Patterns of Substance-Use Among People with Dual-Diagnoses" (Reprint of the 2002 article with extensive methodological commentary) in The Research Process in the Human Services.  Leslie B. Alexander and Phyllis Solomon (editors).  Belmont, CA:  Thomson,  Brooks/Cole.
  • 2006 (with Elizabeth Carpenter and Robert E. Drake) "An Ethnographic Study of Job Seeking among People with Severe Mental Illness", Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, pp 15 - 26.
  • 2007 (with five co-authors) "Ethnocultural Variations in Mental Illness Discourse: Some Implications for Building Therapeutic Alliances", Psychiatric Services, Vol. 58, No. 12, pp.1 - 6
  • 2009 Elizabeth Carpenter-Song, Eduardo Chu, Robert E. Drake, Mieka Ritsema, Beverly Smith, & Hoyt Alverson. "Ethno-Cultural Variations in the Experience and Meaning of Mental Illness and Treatment: Implications for Access and Utilization", Transcultural Psychiatry (in press)

 

Last Updated: 7/31/09