I am a cultural and applied anthropologist with active research projects in the Caribbean (Haiti) and the US Southwest. My principal research interest concerns documenting and analyzing emergent politics of cultural struggle, which I understand as a collective search for sources of value and meaning not predicated on slavery and the racist violence of Western colonialism. I bring an ethnographic, mixed methods approach to these issues drawing on themes from economic, political, and symbolic anthropology.

I also work on a team of applied ethnographers on sponsored research projects in the US Southwest. Our team collaborates with several Native American tribes to document and analyze traditional uses of cultural landscapes to aid stakeholders in management efforts.

Research Interests:

leveling mechanisms; redistributive systems; social and economic closure; social network analysis; slavery and social death; Haiti and the Caribbean; Native Americans; US Southwest; economic anthropology; historical anthropology; applied anthropology