Office of Ethos Editor

Janet Dixon Keller is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned a PhD in Anthropology through the Language Behavior Research Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research, drawing on fieldwork in the South Pacific and among artist-blacksmiths of the United States, investigates relations between culture and mind from several vantage points:language acquisition, verbal and visual knowledge in everyday practices, semantic and symbolic properties of meaning, and uses of traditional narrative for contemporary interests. Publications include two co-edited volumes of the American Ethnologist (1981-82) on Symbolism and Cognition, an edited collection published by the University of California Press (1985) entitled Directions in Cognitive Anthropology, a co-authored book on Cognition and Tool Use among contemporary Artist-Blacksmiths (Cambridge, 1996), and a co-authored volume of traditional South Pacific narratives in contemporary contexts (with Takaronga Kuautonga Crawford House in press).

Jennifer A. Hardin is a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation research focuses on the lived experiences of landed and formerly landed elite families in the Ecuadorian highlands. Her work explores how the position, status, and power of these families in the country’s system of social hierarchy are being transformed by intensifying globalization and radical neoliberal reforms. Her dissertation considers how individuals within and on the margins of this rarely examined social sector in Ecuador reflect on their own experiences and social roles in relation to the workings of cultural hegemony and their shifting positions within the larger social milieu. Moreover, her research examines how her contacts construct and reconstruct their identities through daily practice and discourses of history and memory. Her dissertation research is funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship and a Nelle M. Signor Fellowship in International Relations.