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6047 Silsby Hall
Hanoover, NH 03755
Phone: 603-646-2040
Fax: 603-646-1140
john.m.watanabe@dartmouth.edu
My research focuses on the contemporary Maya peoples of southeastern Mexico and
Guatemala, especially the cultural construction of ethnic and national
identities. My earlier work addressed the way identity emerges out of
everyday perceptions, practices, and local places. My current research
centers on how ethnic and national identities emerge historically.
Drawing on late nineteenth-century administrative records and land titles from
archives in Guatemala City, I am writing an historical ethnography of relations
between Mam Maya communities in western Guatemala and the Guatemalan state as
commercial coffee production intensified during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century.
A related project associated with an Advanced Seminar that I co-directed at
the School of American Research in Santa Fe, NM involves comparing Maya
communities across the contrasting national histories and political
institutions of Mexico and Guatemala. This comparison seeks to clarify
both what remains distinctively "Maya" about these communities, as well as how
national power structures and possibilities still meaningfully -- and
necessarily -- shape global transformations to modernity and postmodernity
across the Maya region.
More broadly, I remain interested in questions of cultural evolution,
specifically how something as improbable as symbolic communication and
conventional meanings ever evolved in the first place. Collaboration with
primatologist Barbara Smuts on ritual greetings and coalition formation among
male baboons has led us to propose that the formalism of ritual may have served
as the behavioral basis for mutual trust -- and perhaps truth -- out of which
symbolization and language evolved as intensified forms of social
cooperation.
In 1993, I received the Karen E. Wetterhahn Memorial Award for Distinguished
Creative or Scholarly Achievement from Dartmouth College. I have also
held national fellowships with the Michigan Society of Fellows (1986 - 1989)
and the National Humanities Center (19998 - 1999). I was awarded a
fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2003 - 2004.
In 2000 - 2001, I served as president of the New England Council of Latin
American Studies.
In the Anthropology Department, I teach the four-field introductory course,
the anthropology of religion, anthropological theory, and courses on Latin
American anthropology.
Selected Publications
- John M. Watanabe. 1983. In the World of the Sun: A Cognitive Model of Mayan
Cosmology. Man n.s. 18 (4): 710-728.
- John M. Watanabe. 1990. From Saints to Shibboleths: Image, Structure, and
Identity in Maya Religious Syncretism. American Ethnologist 17 (1):
129-148.
- John M. Watanabe. 1992. Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World. Austin:
University of Texas Press [now out in Spanish with a new preface as "Los que
estamos aqui": comunidad e identidad entre los mayas de Santiago Chimaltenango,
Huehuetenango, 1937-1990. Eddy H. Gaytan, tr. Serie monografica, no. 15. South
Woodstock, VT and La Antigua Guatemala: Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies and
Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamerica, 2006]
- John M. Watanabe. 1995. Unimagining the Maya: Anthropologists, Others, and
the Inescapable Hubris of Authorship. Bulletin of Latin American Research 14
(1): 25-45.
- John M. Watanabe and Barbara B. Smuts. 1999. Explaining Religion without
Explaining It Away: Trust, Truth, and the Evolution of Cooperation in Roy A.
Rappaport's "The Obvious Aspects of Ritual." In Ecologies for Tomorrow: Reading
Rappaport Today, Aletta Biersack, ed. Contemporary Issues Forum, American
Anthropologist n.s. 101 (1): 98-112.
- John M. Watanabe. 2000. Culturing Identities, the State, and National
Consciousness in Late Nineteenth-Century Western Guatemala. Bulletin of Latin
American Research 19 (3): 321-340.
- John M. Watanabe. 2001. With All the Means that Prudence Would Suggest:
"Procedural Culture" and the Writing of Cultural Histories of Power about
19th-Century Mesoamerica. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 6 (2):
134-174.
- John M. Watanabe and Edward F. Fischer, eds. 2004. Pluralizing Ethnography:
Comparison and Representation in Maya Cultures, Histories, and Identities.
School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series. Santa Fe: School of
American Research Press, 2004.
- John M. Watanabe and Barbara B. Smuts. 2004. Cooperation, Commitment, and
Communication in the Evolution of Human Sociality. In The Evolution and Nature
of Sociality Among Human and Nonhuman Primates, Robert W. Sussman, ed., pp.
288-309. New York: DeGruyter.
- John M. Watanabe. 2004. Some Models in a Muddle: Lineage and House in
Classic Maya Social Organization. Ancient Mesoamerica 15 (1): 91-98.
- John M. Watanabe. 2007. Ritual Economy and the Negotiation of Autarky and
Interdependence in a Ritual Mode of Production. In Mesoamerican Ritual Economy:
Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives. E. Christian Wells and Karla L.
Davis-Salazar, eds., pp. 301–322. Boulder: University of Colorado Press.
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