UCL Anthropology

M.RES (Distinction) Anthropology, UCL, 2005 (Digital Sedimentation of Place and Space in the Highland Mixteca)

B.A. Anthropology & Latin American Studies, University of New Mexico, 2000

PhD Candidate Material & Visual Culture
Title:The Social Construction of Place and Space: a Town in Mexico
Supervisor: Chris Tilley
Start/End date: Oct. 2005/Mar. 2009

I am now 'writing up' after 18 months of ethnographic research centred on a Mexica, Nahua speaking, town in the Mixteca desert highlands of South-west Puebla, Mexico.

This research on the social construction of place focuses on the role of built forms, myths, media technology, transit and migration in the making of locality and mediation of the landscape. How are the features and specifics of landforms, urban-scape and, architecture all engaged in forming body encounters that become patterns of sociality and memory that structure place? What role does changing modes of transport and media technology have in reshaping the landscape and how, when and where things become seen, heard, felt, smelt, obscured and voided? On a reduced scale, how is landscape knowledge applied to the making and marketing of palm crafts and building the Temascal vapour bath? This research asks these questions and takes two items made with locally available materials that have a vital role in the reproduction of long-term technological and social patterns of household activity and construction, to investigate their role in mediating core issues of fertility, health and reproduction that sustain Mexica, Nahua cosmology.

This research is AHRC, University of London & UCL funded:

Arts and Humanities Research Council U.K. 3 year Ph.D. Studentship. (17th Aug. 2006)
UCL Graduate School Research Fund, field research expenses (July, 2006)
University of London Central Research Fund: field research expenses (July, 2006)

email: ucsajro

ucl.ac.uk
Website: (soon).