Mesoamerica and the Southwest: A New History for an Ancient Land On-Site in Mexico City, Arizona and New Mexico, June 17-July 23, 2012 Application Deadline: March 1, 2012 Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and sponsored by The Community College Humanities Association (CCHA), “Mesoamerica and the Southwest: A New History for an Ancient Land”, is a fellowship opportunity for twenty-four select faculty participants from community and four-year colleges and universities to enhance their teaching and research by engaging with scholars in a wide range of disciplines. Up to three spaces are also reserved for graduate students in the humanities. This five-week Institute, held on-site in locations in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, will enable faculty participants to explore the rapidly accumulating new collaborative scholarship by investigators in both Mesoamerican studies and studies of the ancient Southwest. The multidisciplinary approach provides a distinct perspective allowing for greater understanding of the complexities of the culture histories of the two large diverse and interrelated regions of the Americas. The two of us who are directing the project – George Scheper and Laraine Fletcher – and our project manager -- David Berry, Executive Director of the Community College Humanities Association -- have worked together directing many similar travel/study NEH Institutes, and we have also worked with most of our visiting scholars in our previous projects. This is the ninth NEH Institute co-directed by Laraine Fletcher (Chair, Anthropology, Adelphi University); for more than twenty years Laraine has been involved in archaeological fieldwork in Mexico and Central America and is author of numerous publications, especially relating to settlement pattern research; she regularly teaches courses on Mesoamerican and Native American topics. This is the twelfth NEH Institute George Scheper (Faculty Associate and Interim Odyssey Program Director, Advanced Academic Programs, Johns Hopkins University; and emeritus Professor of Humanities, Community College of Baltimore County) has co-directed on topics related to Native American cultures and New World cultural encounters; George regularly teaches interdisciplinary courses for the Center for Liberal Arts of The Johns Hopkins University and for New York University's School of Professional and Continuing Studies, and he is a frequent lecturer for Smithsonian Associates in Washington, D.C.. His research and publications focus on studies in cultural studies and comparative religion. Institute seminars, discussions and on-site field study with our nine renowned visiting specialist scholars in Mexico and in the Southwest will provide a compelling format for the selected group of twenty-four Institute summer scholars directly to engage with the “new history for an ancient land.” Site visits will enable participants to evaluate for themselves at first hand the similarities and differences between such Mesoamerican sites as Teotihuacan, Tenayuca and Tenochtitlan, and such Southwestern sites as Chaco, Mesa Verde and Aztec Ruins -- in terms of commonalities and differences in architecture, site design, iconography, and hypothesized worldviews and religious and ceremonial systems. Institute scholar Karl Taube sums this up by writing that “it has become increasingly apparent that ancient Mesoamerica and the American Southwest were by no means isolated entities but were in direct and sustained contact for millenia. There is abundant material evidence of ancient contact between the two areas, but perhaps more striking is the degree of similarity in religious beliefs” (Road to Aztlan, 102).We use the theme of Aztlan in a variety of ways throughout the Institute as an overarching means to examine both myth and history, as well as continuity and change in the two areas we will be studying. Aztlan in modern Chicano/a usage thus presumes to transgress or erase that border so focal to contemporary Mexican and U.S. cultural discourse. While not the primary focus of our more archaeologically focused project, Institute scholar Ramón Gutierrez will discuss this latter-day Aztlan in a pair of seminars carrying the Institute forward into more recent cultural history
Our second scholar, Karl Taube has vigorously pursued these very parallels in a series of groundbreaking articles that analyze certain iconographic themes that predominate in the arts of both Mesoamerica and Southwest: elemental themes such as mountains, clouds, rain, maize-corn, and fertility -- and the corresponding deities or spirit-beings associated with these natural forms. Together, Pohl and Taube will conduct a study visit to Mexico City's Museum of Anthropology. and together they will also conduct a field study to the nearby Classic-period urban center of Teotihuacan. A culmination of this line of study will be full-day visit to Aztec sites in Mexico City. We will begin with a study visit to the Aztec Templo Mayor, the remains of the great temple that stood at the heart of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. a tour conducted by the curatorial staff of the on-site Museum of the Templo Mayor. We will then continue by bus to the remains of the twin city of Tlatelolco and to two smaller Aztec temples (Tenayuca and Santa Cecelia Atitlan) now found in outlying districts of Mexico City. Seminar discussions led by our third scholar, Eloise Quiñones Keber, will enable participants to compare their on-site experiences with how these Mesoamerican ceremonial centers and their attendant rituals were described in such ethnohistorical sources as the writings of the sixteenth century Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Our fourth scholar in Mexico, Alan Sandstrom will bring these Pre-Columbian themes into the currency of contemporary Nahua culture, that is, the culture of contemporary indigenous people of Central Mexico belonging to the same ethnicity as the Aztecs and speaking a variant of the same Nahuatl language as the Aztecs. Sandstrom's seminars will thus form an effective transition to our move to the Southwest where we will explore the same or similar themes in both Pre-Columbian and contemporary Puebloan culture. After two weeks in Mexico City, our group flies to Phoenix, Arizona, where we begin with a visit to the site and museum of Pueblo Grande, devoted to the remains of the ancient Hohokam culture, considered the Southwest culture closest in style and substance to the Mesoamerican cultures of Mexico. We then move on to Flagstaff, where we will be based for four nights in conference facilities of the University of Northern Arizona, Kelley Hays-Gilpin and Ramson Lomatewama and other Hopi colleagues have been engaged in a sustained comparative study of Mesoamerican history and culture in relation to traditional Hopi history and culture. Hays-Gilpin and Lomatewama will offer seminars and conduct field study of the Hopi mesas in connection with Hopi oral traditions about their tribal origins and history. We next move on to residences at Santa Fe University of Art and Design, where seminars will be conducted by Stephen Lekson and Kent Reilly. Lekson is the author the new essential text, A History of the Ancient Southwest (2008), which is devoted precisely to reviewing the past scholarship -- and lack of it -- on the interconnections of Mesoamerica and the Southwest and he will build on his seminars around interpretations of the important sites of Chaco, Aztec (New Mexico), and Mesa Verde subsequently to be visited by the group. Reilly has long devoted his research and publication to the cosmovisions embodied in the material culture of the Olmec, the Maya and the Aztec of Mexico, the Pueblo of the southwest and the Mound-builder cultures of the Mississippi and the Southeast. In our scheduel Lekson and Reilly will overlap (as did Pohl and Taube in Mexico) so that participants will have the benefit of their scholarly interchange. The Institute will then have the opportunity to make study visits to the Southwestern archaeological sites of Chaco, Aztec Ruins, Mesa Verde, Pecos and Hawikuh, in overnight field trips escorted respectively by Fran Levine Donna and Donna Glowacki. Our final scholar in the southwest, Ramón Gutiérrez will offer two separate sets of seminars for the Institute. The first set, prior to the overnight excursions in the Four Corners region, will focus on Pueblo culture on the eve of contact Then, to conclude our Institute, Professor Gutiérrez will return to offer a pair of seminars on the persistence of the themes to which we will have devoted our study in Chicano/a literature and art, particularly in the reclamation of the Aztán theme in contemporary murals and folk art
Stipend. Accepted NEH Summer Scholars for a five-week Institute are awarded a stipend of $3900. Because "Mesoamerica and the Southwest" is being held on-site in locations in two countries, with a full program of pre-arranged logistical commitments, the stipend monies are pooled to cover necessary costs paid in advance directly by CCHA. NEH Summer Scholars in the “Mesoamerica/Southwest” Institute receive all lodging, internal travel and site-visit costs for all scheduled activities during the Institute (along with some pre-arranged meals), as specified in the detailed Daily Schedule. Summer Scholars in the program are responsible for all meal expenses other than when pre-arranged, for personal expenses, and for their own travel arrangements to arrive in Mexico City by Sunday, June 17, 2012 and for return from Santa Fe, New Mexico on or after Sunday July 23, 2012 Dr. Laraine Fletcher, Ph.D., Chair, Anthropology, Adelphi University Dr. George Scheper, Ph.D., Interim Director, Odyssey Program, Advanced Academic Programs, Johns Hopkins University and Professor emeritus, Humanities, Community College of Baltimore County Institute Visiting Faculty: John Pohl (Curator of the Arts of the Americas, the UCLA Fowler Museum) will conduct two seminars on Mixtec and Aztec migration narratives and co-lead a study visit the Museum of Anthropology and Teotihuacan. Karl Taube (Anthropology, University of California at Riverside) will conduct seminars on Mesoamerican and Southwestern iconography, and lead a study visit the Museum of Anthropology and Teotihuacan. Eloise Quiñones Keber (Art, Baruch College and the Graduate Center of CUNY) will conduct two seminars on Aztec ethnohistorical sources and on representations of Aztec ritual. Alan Sandstrom (Anthropology emeritus, Indiana-Purdue University) will conduct two seminars on contemporary Nahua culture and religion. Kelley Hays-Gilpin (Archaeology, Northern Arizona University and Research Associate, Museum of Northern Arizona) will conduct two seminars on Pueblo archaeology and co-escort field trips to the Hopi mesas with Ramson Lomatewama. Stephen Lekson (Curator of Anthropology, Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado) will conduct two seminars on the archaeology and history of the Ancient Southwest. F. Kent Reilly (University of Southwest Texas) will conduct a seminar on the continuities of Mesoamerican and Southwestern and Mississippian studies. Ramón Gutiérrez (U.S. History, University of Chicago) will conduct four days of seminar on early Puebloan culture on the eve of the Spanish incursion and the dynamics of the Pueblo/Spanish cultural interaction; and on the motif of Aztlan in Chicano literature and art. Fran Levine (Director, New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe) will accompany the group as scholar/escort in the field trips to Pecos, Kuaua [Bernalillo], Acoma and Laguna Pueblos. Donna Glowacki (Anthropology, University of Notre Dame) will accompany the group as scholar escort in the field experiences at Mesa Verde. For additional information you may contact the Project Manager: Prof. David Berry, Executive Director of CCHA, the Community College Humanities Association) tel 973-877-3204; berry@essex.edu Or contact one of the Project Directors: Dr. Laraine Fletcher (Chair, Anthropology, Adelphi University (fletcher@adelphi.edu or larainefletcher@aol.com Dr. George Scheper Advanced Academic Programs, Johns Hopkins University (shepbklyn@aol.com)
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