Departmental News

Posted:  May 09, 2025 - 12:00pm

Dr. Les Field, professor in the Socio Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology (SCALA) subfield in the Department of Anthropology, has been awarded the 2025-2026 Snead Wertheim Endowed Lecture. This lectureship was created in 1989 by Jerry and Mary Carole May Wertheim and James E. and Georgia Phillips Snead. Wertheim and Snead are UNM alumni and attorneys in Santa Fe. The lectureship rotates between the UNM Department of Anthropology and the UNM Department of History and recognizes a significant scholarly activity by a faculty member.  Dr. Field will present his research results at a public lecture in the Spring of 2026.

Abstract

This project initiates research focusing on the ideas of author and intellectual Uriah Katzenelenbogen (1885-1980), born in the Pale of Settlement in lands that became the Republic of Lithuania after WWI, who developed provocative ideas about nation-building that would signal a novel integration of the Jewish population into Lithuanian social structure and political life.  One focus of research will be upon Katzenelenbogen’s conceptualization of multi-culturalism in a manner markedly different from the concept as it has been used in the last few decades particularly in Latin America. A second focus is Katzenelenbogen’s practice of ethnography among rural Lithuanians in the 1920s, on the basis of which he published a remarkable book about the Lithuanian folksong tradition, The Daina (1936).