Departmental News

Posted:  Oct 16, 2025 - 12:00pm

Dr. Les Field has been awarded the Snead Wertheim Endowed Lectureship.  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.  He will present his talk on Friday, April 10 at 2 pm in Hibben 105.

Dr. Field's presentation focuses on the ideas of author and intellectual Uriah Katzenelenbogen (1885-1980), born in the Russian Pale of Settlement, in lands that became the Republic of Lithuania after WWI.  Katzenelenbogen developed and promoted novel, provocative ideas about nation-building and a novel integration of the Jewish population into the social structure and political life of the new Republic of Lithuania.  One focus of my presentation will be upon Katzenelenbogen’s conceptualization of multi-culturalism in a manner markedly different from the concept as it has been used in Latin America, re-focusing that concept towards inter-culturalism. Dr. Field shifts the focus from state-designed and managed recognition of cultural identities and expression within sharply defined boundaries, towards social movements that produce dialogue and promote shared national identities among different cultural groups.  A second focus is upon 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. Dr. Field will interrogate inter-culturalism, which is and has been a central mode of co-existence among diverse peoples in New Mexico, as well as the practice of ethnography, a central focus of sociocultural anthropology.