Michael A. Uzendoski, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

• Curriculum Vitae
• Fieldschool in Napo, Ecuador

Phone: (850) 644-4749 Fax: (850) 645-0032 Email: muzendoski@fsu.edu Office Hours: By Appointment

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• Research Interests and Activities
• Specializations
• Recent Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Research Interests and Activities

• I first went to Ecuador in 1993 and since 1994 have worked with Amazonian Quichua speakers of Upper Napo. I spent years learning and studying Quichua and have found that Amazonian Quichua is a rich and poetic language. One constant of my research has been finding ways to document and translate the poetics of Amazonian Quichua oral culture. While living among Quichua speakers, I became very aware that very basic philosophical assumptions (like the idea of a thing, a person, a plant, time, or substance itself) are quite different when one moves from secular Western to Amazonian social contexts. These differences have made the task of writing ethnography problematic, so I have experimented with humanistic ways of writing. My research and teaching continually emphasize that human worlds are defined by substances and things that cannot be divorced from the imagination. Consequently, the creation and reproduction of society moves through the physical and into such symbolic and imaginary realms.
• Ethnographic Area: Latin America, Amazonia, Andes, Ecuador
  Subject Concentration: Sociocultural Anthropology, Economic Anthropology, Ethnopoetics, Ethnohistory

Teaching Specializations

• Introduction to Anthropology
• Economic Anthropology
• Peoples and Cultures of Amazonia
• Conquest of the Americas
• Contemporary Theory as Applied to the Andean Region
• Symbol and Ritual
• Ethnopoetics
• History of Anthropological Theory
• Quichua

Select Publications and Writing Projects