OSEA Study Abroad Programs and Field Study
We are looking for highly motivated, creative, and flexible persons with a variety of skills, experience, training, and interest not just in cultural anthropology and ethnography, but in any one or more of: photography, video, visual anthropology, theatre arts, staging design, installation, invisible theatre, performance art, studio art, Maya cultures, Mèxico and Latin America, Indigenous peoples, history, ethnohistory, art history, epigraphy, archeology, cultural studies, writing, journalism, tourism, museum studies, ESL, multicultural education, critical pedagogy, anthropology of education. This program is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students of all levels as well as persons who are not currently in enrolled in a degree granting program.

OSEA offers intensive, on-site fieldwork training in ethnography. Different programs are available to suit the needs and interests of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as professionals and other persons who are not students who have a need to develop new skills in interdisciplinary research methodologies.

New for 2008: Independent & Individualized ~ Customize Your Field Study Program to Fit Your Needs

The OSEA training programs are designed to be flexible while retaining a structure for hands-on, interactive learning for small groups. Beginning in January, course offerings include a three and a four week January Program, a Winter Quarter, and a Spring Semester. All programs are based in total cultural and linguistic immersion within a œstudy abroad” format.

Pisté and Chichén Itzá
The program is based in the Yucatec Maya Community of Pisté, which is just 2 miles from the modern archeological ruins and tourist site of Chichén Itzá. Pisté, a cosmopolitan town of 4,000 persons with over 150 years of engagement with anthropologists and their ancestors, offers a unique opportunity for students interested in contemporary questions of cultural processes, dynamics, and transformations.

Living in Maya home-stays in the shadow of the ruins of Chichén Itzá, the student researcher participants take two seminars, a topics course in Cultural Anthropology and a methods course in Interdisciplinary Ethnography. The Seminar in Cultural Anthropology includes coursework in Maya culture and civilization, history of YucatÌn, Maya art traditions, Maya healing and medical traditions, tourism development, cultural ecology, and related topics. The Seminar in Ethnography develops questions of the ethics of fieldwork, representation, history of methods, research design, the formulation of research problems.

Language Study: Maya and Spanish
All of OSEA ethnographic training programs begin with intensive Spanish and Maya language courses that rely upon œreality-learning” pedagogies. This first phase of the program is followed by the Seminars in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnography. In a third phase of the program, students then conduct their own independent research projects that they have designed in close supervision with OSEAÆs internationally recognized experts. The independent research projects are conducted at appropriate sites in the YucatÌn. For example, students may develop a research project that involves living in Mèrida, the capital of the state of YucatÌn, Pistè, or another village or town in the YucatÌn Peninsula.

During the independent research, the students gather together on a weekly basis in Pistè for a Workshop in Fieldwork. These allow students to share, exchange, reflect, evaluate, and compare their own and their colleagues research activities. Students are encouraged to develop independent thinking, autonomy, self-reliance and integrity.

Each of the training programs include educational trips to major sites of attraction. In the January Programs, students attend major religious holidays and visit archaeological sites. The semester program includes a group trip to the Mexican Caribbean as well as a week of spring break.