NORMAN E. WHITTEN, JR.
Professor Emeritus

My interests center on transformations and reproductions of cultural systems and representations at national, regional and diasporic levels, and their manifestations among ethnically diverse peoples at local and regional levels. I am especially interested in the confluence of aesthetics, cosmology, power, magicality and interculturality. At the national level my focus has been especially strong on Ecuador (since 1961), where I continue to carry out long-term, intensive local-level ethnographic research with the Canelos Quichua and Achuar Jivaroan people of Upper Amazonia (since 1968), as well as sporadic, short-term research with such Andean people as the Otavalans, Salasacans, and Tiguans (since 1964). I also specialize in African Diaspora Studies, which I see as intertwined with indigenous history. My most intensive field research in this area has been with the Afro-Latin Americans of western Ecuador and Colombia (from 1981 through 1968), and I have done field research among black people in the southern United States and Maritime Canada. I regard ethnography as a theory-constructive endeavor, and I seek to unite ethnographic insights with historical contexts, including those often characterized as “structures of the conjuncture” and the “longue durée.”

With my wife, Dorothea Scott Whitten, I am currently working on a project tentatively entitled “Modernity and Magicality among South American Peoples,” and I am beginning work on another project of “Millennial Movements in Modern States.” Both projects have their genesis in the cultural transformations, political conjunctures, and aesthetic contours among diverse Ecuadorians, and with the structures and significances of power relationships unfolding in contemporary states. I am especially interested in social movements that result in structural changes, and in new cultural shaping mechanisms through which transformed and revitalized senses of “community” emerge at local, regional, and diasporic levels of identity and representation.

Research Interests:

Cultural Anthropology, Social organization, power structure and dynamics, ritual, symbolism, ethnoaesthetics, cultural imagery, modernity and magicality, nationalism, national development, ethnic-bloc formation, cultural transformations, millennial movements, political democracy and social movements, South America (particularly indigenous peoples of the moist tropics and the Andes and Afro-Latin Americans); Canadian Maritimes; New World Black and indigenous cultural continuity and cultural change in comparative perspective.

EDUCATION:

B.A. Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Colgate University, 1959

M.A. Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1961

Ph.D. Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1964

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

Books:

2003

(editor) Millennial Ecuador: Critical Essays on Cultural Transformations and Social Dynamics. Iowa City: Iowa University Press.

1998

(co-editor with Arlene Torres) Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean: Social Dynamics and Cultural Transformations. Two Volumes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (Blacks in the Diaspora Series).

1993

(edited, with Dorothea S. Whitten) Imagery and Creativity: Ethnoaesthetics and Art Worlds in the Americas. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

1988

(with Dorothea S. Whitten) From Myth to Creation: Art from Amazonian Ecuador. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Essays & Articles:

2003	"Symbolic Inversion, the Topology of 'El Mestizaje' and the Spaces of 'Las Razas' in Ecuador." Journal of Latin American Anthropology, special issue on Mestizaje, Mulataje, Mesticagen in Latin American Ideologies edited by Jean Muteba Rahier. 8 (1):52-85.
1999	(with Rachel Corr) "Imagery of 'Blackness' in Indigenous Myth, Discourse, and Ritual." In, Jean Muteba Rahier, editor. Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities. Westport CT: Greenwood Publishing Group.
1997	(with Dorothea S. Whitten and Alfonso Chango; illustrations by Alfonso Chango) "Return of the Yumbo: The Indigenous Caminata from Amazonia to Andean Quito." American Ethnologist 24 (2): 355-391.
1996	"The Ecuadorian Levantamiento Indígena of 1990 and the Epitomizing Symbol 1992: Reflections on Nationalism, Ethnic-Bloc Formation, and Racialist Ideologies." In, Jonathan Hill, editor. Culture, Power and History: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 191-217.