Les Field

Professor
Director, Graduate Committee

Photo: Les Field

Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology

At UNM since 
1994
Email: 
lesfield@unm.edu
Curriculum vitae
 

Recent Courses:

  • ANTH 1140: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
  • ANTH 330: Principles of Cultural Anthropology
  • ANTH 498: Honors Seminar
  • ANTH 334/534 Colombia in War and Peace
  • ANTH 343/543 Anthropology of Occupation: Palestine 
  • ANTH 547 Theory II for First Year Graduate Students
  • ANTH 530: Interdisciplinary Marxisms

Education:

BA (cum laude) Johns Hopkins University (1979)

PhD, Duke University (1987)
Dissertation: “‘I am content with my art’: Two Groups of Artisans in Revolutionary Nicaragua”

Research:

Indigenous Identities; Nationalist Ideologies and the State; Resources and Development; Social Transformations and Landscapes; Conflict Zones; Licit and Illicit; Food and Agriculture; Collaborative Research Methods and Epistemologies


Geographical Region: Nicaragua, Colombia, Indigenous California, Palestine, Greenland

Recent Publications:

Nd. "Colombian Utopia and Anti-Utopia: Remembering and Reconsidering the FARC’s Zona de Despeje, 1998-2002," (with Félix Manuel Burgos" Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, under review.
2021 “Solentiname’s Utopian Legacies and the Contemporary Comunidades Eclesiales del Base (CEBs): An Exchange Between Les W. Field and Lara Gunderson,” A Contracorriente: una revista de estudios latinoamericanos 18(3) Spring 2021: 311-337.

2020      “Gold, Ontological Difference, and Object Agency,” in The Anthropology of Precious Minerals, Andrew Walsh, Annabel Vallard and Elizabeth Emma Ferry, eds. University of Toronto Press, January 2020.

2017 “The Colombia-Israel Nexus: Towards Historical and Analytic Contexts,” Latin American Research Review, 52(4): 639-653.

2016  Challenging the Dichotomy: The Licit and the Illicit in Archaeological and Heritage Discourses Edited by Les Field, Cristobal Gnecco, and Joe Watkins. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

2016 “Introduction” (co-authored with Cristobal Gnecco and Joe Watkins) in Challenging the Dichotomy: The Licit and the Illicit in Archaeological and Heritage Discourses,  Les Field, Cristobal Gnecco, and Joe Watkins, eds. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Pp. 3-20.

2016 “Dynamism not Dualism: Money and Commodity, Archaeology and Guaquería, Gold and Wampum,” in Challenging the Dichotomy: The Licit and the Illicit in Archaeological and Heritage Discourses,  Edited by Les Field, Cristobal Gnecco, and Joe Watkins. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Pp. 180-196.

2013 "Double Trouble: Implications of Historicizing Identity Discourses," in Anthropology and the Politics of Representation: Identity Strategies, Decentered Selves and Crucial Places. Gabriela Vargas Cetina, ed.  University of Alabama Press. Pp. 19-32

2013 “Museo del Oro: viñetas” (with Cristobal Gnecco). Revista Colombiana de Antropología, vol. 49(2).

2013 “Mapping Erasure: The Power of Nominative Cartography in the Past and Present of the Muwekma Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay Area,” in Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles and Indigenous Rights in the United States: A Sourcebook. Amy E. Den Ouden and Jean O’Brien, eds. University of North Carolina Press. Pp. 287-310.

2013 “The Palestine Field School: Decoloniality and the Geopolitics of Knowledge,” (with Alex Lubin, Jakob Schiller and Melanie Yazzie) Social Text 31(4): 79-97.

2013 “Introduction,” in “Imagining Palestinian Archaeologies,” Special Issue of Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress, 9(2): 1-14.

2013 “Imagining Palestinian Archaeologies,” Special Issue of Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress, 9(2)