People
Faculty
Castañeda founded and directed the independent Field School in Experimental Ethnography (1997-2000) as a way for undergraduate and graduate students to get on-site, hands-on training in ethnography. The Field School was gave student researcher-participants the opportunity to conduct collaborative team research in three areas: the
transcultural dynamics of teaching English to Maya children, the community
history of Pisté in relation to 100 years of anthropological
presence, and the contemporary Maya art of Chichén Itzá. The Field School was supported in part by a major grant from the Fideicomiso Mexico-USA, a bi-national organization formed by the Rockefellar Foundation, Bancomer Cultural Foundation and the Mexican Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA).
In 2003, Castañeda and Dr. Juan Castillo Cocom collaborated to create the Open School of Ethnography and Anthropology as a non-degree training program focusing on field study abroad programs.
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Dr. Juan Castillo Cocom
(PhD 2000, Florida International University)
Visiting Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University California Berkeley
(Spring 2008)
Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo, UIMQRoo (2007-present)
Professor of Anthropology, Universidad del Oriente, Valladolid, Yucatán (2006-2007)
Universidad de Campeche, Ciudad del Carmen (2005-2006)
Professor of Anthropology
Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, Mérida, Yucatán (2004 -2005)
CONTACT
juan@osea-cite.org
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Castillo Cocom’s doctoral dissertation was an ethnographic study
on Maya identity and the related North American cultural anthropology
discourse. He is the author of various articles on identity and specifically
has written on Maya identity politics. Castillo Cocom’s current
research project is an ethnography and history of the protestant mission
in Xocenpich, Yucatán. He is an authority on the infamous “Cultivo
Yucateco,” and characters types, personalities, and the popular
culture of Yucatán. If one spends an afternoon with Castillo
Cocom, it will become clear that he circulates freely in the popular
and intellectual circles of Mérida and provides unique insight
on both, not to mention he is an excellent resource on the people, practices,
and place of Yucatán. He teaches at the Universidad Pedagógica
Nacional-Mérida and has taught at Florida International University,
the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, CINVESTAV, and the
Universidad de la Habana, Cuba. In 2003, he was the Yucatán academic
seminar leader for the Fulbright Hays Summer Seminar on Indigenous Cultures
and Environmental Issues in México and Costa Rica. Castillo Cocom
is a Co-Founder of OSEA.
Castillo Cocom is currently on a visiting professorship in Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley during the spring 2008 semester. Castillo Cocom participated in a workshop sponsored by Indiana University on the politics and reception of Mel Gibson's film, Apocalypto. In 2007, Since the summer of 2007, he has been the chair of the teaching faculty of the Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo.
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On-Site Student Liaison and Lodging Coordinator
Victor Olalde
Licensed Tour Guide at Chichén Itzá
CONTACT
Contact Victor to arrange for a tour of Chichen or for lodging at the Posada Olalde
call 011-52-985-951-0086
» Read More About Victor
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Victor Olalde, a resident of Pisté, has been a close associate of Drs. Castañeda and Castillo Cocom for over 20 years. Victor is a licensed tour guide and the owner-operator of the Posada Olalde, which OSEA summer students use as home base while living and working in Chichén Itzá. Victor is a self taught polyglot. In addition to his native Maya and Spanish, he is fluent in English and German and can converse in Italian. Currently he is learning Japanese. Victor's base work is to provide tours to German tourists that arrive in prearranged groups. But he is also available for independent tourists and for providing tours throughout the Yucatán. He has provided special tours to a variety of celebrities and political personages, including Jeb Bush's wife. In addition to this work, Victor is also available for OSEA students as a special cultural liaison, friend, and resource.
Affiliate Faculty
Dr. Betty Faust
Professor
CINVESTAV, México
Ph.D., Syracuse University
e: faust@mda.cinvestav.mx
Faust is a Full (category 3 of 3) Professor at CINVESTAV (Mérida,
Yucatán) at the department of Human Ecology. She is also a
member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores [SNI] (Category 2
of 3). The SNI is an elite academic Mexican organization that unites
the topmost researchers of Mexico of all scientific disciplines. Her
research has focused on questions of the cultural interface between
Maya communities and the natural world, cosmology, healing and healers,
development, applied anthropology, and cultural ecology. She has been
the primary advisor and reader on more than a dozen masters theses
and doctoral dissertations in anthropology and inter-disciplinary
studies. She has been the primary advisor and reader on more than
a dozen masters theses and doctoral dissertations in anthropology
and inter-disciplinary studies. She has many articles published in
US and Mexican journals and has authored the ground-breaking ethnographic
study, Mexican Rural Development and the Plumed
Serpent: Technology and Maya Cosmology in the Tropical Forest of Campeche,
México (1998).
» Read More About Betty
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Dr. Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola
Anthropology, CIESAS Peninsular
PhD 1995, University College London
Fortuny Loret de Mola is social anthropologist with specialization in religion and immigration. In addition to fieldwork in Yucatán and Jalisco, México, she has directed and participated in national and international
research projects with immigrant and religious communities in San Francisco, Atlanta, Houston, and Immokalee, Florida. She pioneered the ethnographic study of Protestantism in the Yucatan and is the leading expert on the church Luz de Mundo, which was founded in Mexico and then "exported" or "globalized" around the world, including the USA. Fortuny Loret de Mola is a Professor and Researcher (Title C) at CIESAS,
where she has worked since 1988. She is the author of two books and
more than 60 articles and chapters on religion, conversion narrative,
secularization, and transnational migration. She is a National Researcher
of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores Nivel II and the recipient
of Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundation Grants.
» Read More About Patricia
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Maya Language Faculty
Hilario Chi Canul
Maestro de Lengua Maya, Universidad Intercultural Maya de Quintana Roo
Affiliate Instructor, OSEA
Hilario Chi Canul, a native of Quintana Roo, is the Maya Language Professor at the UIMQRoo in Jose Maria Morelos, Quintana Roo.
Previously he has worked with well known US and Mexican filmmakers, including Mel Gibson, Nickelodeon and Cartes Smith in "Ruins." He has been the Maya language narrator in a number of commercial, art, and educational films. In 2007, he was the National Champion of Indigenous Language Oratory. In the November 26, 2007 Hilario presented an analysis of the politics of Maya language in the film production of Apocalypto at Indiana University and participated in a workshop discussion of training indidenous actors to speak Maya. In 2006 Hilario won First Place in the National Oratory Championship in Indigenous Langauges and, most recently, in March 2008 he won First Place in the Latin American competition -- Concurso Latinoamericano de Oratoria Lenguas Indígenas. He received the honor of the title Guerrerro Ocelotl by the Gran seño;rio de Xaltocan.
» Read More About Hilario
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Francisco Cen K’u
Maya Language Instructor
Cen K’u is a Yucatec Maya from the town Xocenpich, Yucatán.
He has extensive experience with the cultivation of milpa and with
beekeeping. His knowledge of Yucatec Maya and the ecological environment
of the Southeast of Yucatán is overwhelming. He has worked
with several anthropologists to teach them Yucatec Maya and the curative
plants’ properties of the region. He is easy going and will be
a pillar for OSEA in helping the students practice Yucatec Maya. Furthermore,
his vast knowledge of the rituals of milpa making and his knowledge
of quotidian Maya life will promote a personal and human cross-cultural
exchange between him and the students.
Don Ambrosio Cupul Matos
Maya Language Instructor
Cupul Matos is a Yucatec Maya from the town Xocenpich, Yucatán.
His occupation is to make milpa [corn fields]. Don Ambrosio never attended
elementary school, yet when the Presbyterian Missionary Mission inaugurated
the Instituto Bíblico del Sureste (Biblical Institute of the
Southeast), or IBS, in Xochenpich in 1941, to prepare Yucatec Maya-speaking
Obreros (Pastor’s assistants), Don Ambrosio registered himself
as a student in that Institute. There he learned Spanish. Eventually
he learned English from an Evangelical pilot-Pastor of the Mission Aviation
Fellowship that flew a Cessna to access remote locations in the Yucatán
Peninsula in order to spread the Gospel since he had been one of his
mechanics. Don Ambrosio not only learned how to repair the Cessna, but
he also learned how fly. As a speaker of Yucatec Maya, Don Ambrosio
cooperated with the Wycliffe Bible Translators in translating The
New Testament into Yucatec Maya [Le Tumben Nupt’an] (1961)
during 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, he also taught Yucatec Maya to
generations of U.S. missionaries in his home town from the 1950s through
the 1970s.
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In addition to the faculty listed here,
OSEA programs involve faculty and guest lecturers with diverse research
and teaching interests to support our programs pedagogical and research
interests.
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