Mary Weismantel

Professor (Ph.D. U. of IL, Urbana-Champaign 1986)
1812 Hinman Avenue, Room 105
(847) 491-4822
mjweis@northwestern.edu

RESEARCH INTERESTS. Mary Weismantel has written on a wide variety of topics, ranging from food to adoption, and from contemporary popular culture to ancient ceramics. Two threads connect her work: a sustained interest in theorizing materiality, and a lifelong interest in the Andean region of South America. Her areas of expertise include race and sex.

She is currently writing a book on Pre-Columbian art, which will be published as a textbook by Prentice-Hall. This book grows out of her popular undergraduate course on the same subject, which she has been teaching since 1990. It also reflects her long-term interest in the ancient Americas, and in developing interdisciplinary approaches to its study that incorporate the archaeological interest in political economy, an ethnographer’s holistic sensibility, and the humanism of the art historian, as well as an awareness of the political and cultural uses of the ancient past in the contemporary Americas, including among U.S. Chicanos and Latinos.

Additionally, she is continuing her research on Moche ceramics, produced on the North Coast of Peru in the first millennium. Recent and upcoming results of this work include an article on sex and reproduction in the American Anthropologist; a paper to be delivered at a Presidential Session of the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association on the topic of “Orgasm”; and a paper to be delivered at a conference at Duke University in 2007 on “Ethnoporn”.

A new research interest is the relationship between humans and animals, which she will be exploring this spring as Jean Gimbel Lane Humanities Professor at the Alice Berlan Kaplan Center for the Humanities here at Northwestern. She is exploring two themes at present: the relationship between deer and humans in indigenous American societies of North and South America; and the relationship between horse and rider in the British hunter/jumper riding tradition.

Professor Weismantel has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including funding from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, and National Endowment from the Humanities. She is an Associate Curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, and has served as Editor of the Journal of Latin American Anthropology. She is currently Program Chair of the Association of Feminist Anthropologists.

RECENT COURSES TAUGHT

Introduction to American Cultural Anthropology

Art of the Ancient Americas

Exchange Theory

Social History of Food

NEW COURSES FOR 2006-2007

Research Methods in the Study of Sexuality (WCAS Junior Seminar with Gregory Ward, Linguistics)

Being Animal/Being Human (Humanities Center workshop with Susan Pearson, History)

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books

2001 Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Awarded the AES Senior Book Award, and Honorable Mention for the Victor Turner Award of the SHA.

1989 Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press. Paperback edition, 1992. Spanish translation: Alimentación, género y pobreza en los andes ecuatorianos, Biblioteca Abya-Yala, 1994. Re-issued by Waveland Press, 1998.

Articles in Refereed Journals

2004 Moche Sex Pots: Reproduction and Temporality in Ancient South

America. American Anthropologist 106(3):495-505.

2000 Race Rape: White Masculinity in Andean Pishtaco Tales. Identities

7(3):407-440.

1998 Race in the Andes: Global Movements and Popular Ontologies.

Introduction to a special issue of the Bulletin of Latin American Research on “Race in the Andes”, Vol. 17(2):121-142. With Stephen Eisenman.

1997 White Cannibals: Fantasies of Racial Violence in the Andes. Identities

4(1): 9-44.

1995 Making Kin: Kinship Theory and Zumbagua Adoptions. American

Ethnologist 22(4):685-709.

Chapters in Books

2007 Towards a Social History of Animals. With Susan Pearson. In Animals

in History. German Historical Institute/ Rowman and Littlefield. Forthcoming.

2006 The Ayllu, real and imagined: the romance of community in the Andes.

The Seductions of Community: Emancipations, Oppressions, Quandaries. Gerald Creed, editor. Forthcoming, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

2005 Afterword: Andean Identities: Multiplicities, Socialities, Materialities.

Natives Making Nation: Gender, Indigeneityand the State in the Andes. Andrew Canessa, editor. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Pps. 181-193.

Tasty Meals and Bitter Gifts. In The Taste Culture Reader: Experiencing Food and Drink, Carolyn Korsmeyer, ed. Oxford: Berg.. Pps. 87-99. Originally appeared in Food and Foodways, 1991.

2004 Cities of Women. In Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective, 4th edition.

Caroline Brettell and Carolyn Sargent, eds. Prentice-Hall.

White. In Fat, Don Kulick and Anne Meneley, eds. New York: Penguin.

2003 Mothers of the patria: La Chola Cuencana and the Mama Negra.

Millenial Ecuador, Critical Essays On Cultural Transformations And Social Dynamics Norman E. Whitten, Jr., editor.Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

1999 Sweet Interloper. Co-authored with Sidney Mintz. Pps. 55-74 in The

Globalization of Food, Leonard Plotnicov and Richard Scaglion, eds. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press. Previously published as a special issue of Ethnology entitled Consequences of Cultivar Diffusion.