Room 5419
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10016
(212) 817-8438
clacls@gc.cuny.edu
June Nash

Distinguished Professor Emerita
Department of Anthropology, City College
Ph.D. Program in Anthropology, Graduate Center

Junenash27@gmail.com

68 Prospect St.
Plainfield, MA 01070
413 634-2128

June Nash is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the City University of New York, Graduate Center and City College. Her early fieldwork was in Chiapas, Mexico where she worked with Mayas, publishing In the Eyes of the Ancestors: Belief and Behavior in a Mayan Community (1970, 1986), translated as Bajo la mirada de los antepasados (Mexico D.F. 1975, 1993). Her work in tin mining communities of Bolivia resulted in the monograph We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Mining Communities (1979) which received the C. Wright Mills honorable mention in 1980. She also completed a family autobiography with Juan Rojas, first published as, He Agotado Mi Vida en la Mina in l976 and translated in 1992 as I Spent My Life in the Mines with additional chapters of his grown children and wife. The autobiography was the basic script for a documentary film she produced still being distributed by Cinema Guild. During the l970s Nash was engaged in feminist and working class movements, co-editing with Helen Safa Sex and Class in Latin America,and Women and Change in Latin America, and with M. Patricia Fernandez Kelly, Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor. Prompted by questions the miners asked about corporations in the United States, she undertook a study of General Electric workers and the community of Pittsfield resulting in a monograph From Tank Town to High Tech: The Clash of Community and Industrial Cycles. In 1989 she returned to her roots in Chiapas as the least conflicted field area in which to train future anthropologists. Women she had known in the 1960s were selling artisan products in a world market that they had been making and selling for over 1000 years in local and regional markets. The anthology she edited, Crafts in the World Market, 1993) demonstrates how even the most traditional of artisans are deeply involved in the global world order. Within five years of her return, indigenous migrants to the Lacandon rainforest burst into global headlines with an uprising that spelled the end of hegemonic rule by the Party of the Institutional Revolution and initiated a decade of counterinsurgent militarism. She summarizes these decades of fieldwork and reflections with Mayas in her book, Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization (2001) that is translated into Spanish as Visiones Mayas (2006), and in an edited anthology with articles by her students and colleagues The Explosion of Indigenous Communities in Chiapas, Mexico (1995), with simultaneous publication in Spanish as La Explosion de Comunidades Indigenas. In 2004 she published an anthology of articles Social Movements: A Reader. Her most recent book, Practicing Ethnography in a Global World: An Anthropological Odyssey, reviews some of the paradigms she has worked with in her fifty years of fieldwork and teaching. 

She received the Conrad Arensburg award for ethnological studies in 1993, the American Anthropological Association’s Distinguished Service Award in 1995, and the Kalman Silvert award of the Latin American Studies Association in 2004. An award for a graduate student paper, the Nash-Roseberry award, gave its first prize at the meeting of the Society of Latin Ameican Anthropologists during the national meetings of the American Anthropological Association in October 2006.

She continues to revisit field sites in Chiapas, Guatemala, and Bolivia. She recently published “Consuming Interest: Water, Rum, and Coco Cola; From Ritual Propitiation to Corporate Appropriation in Mesoamerica.” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 22, #4:621-39. November 2007, A comparative paper based on her work in Guatemala and Chiapas Mexico over a half century, “Development to Unite Us: Autonomy and Multicultural Coexistence in Chiapas and Guatemala.” appeared in the first issue of New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, Vol. 1, No.1:14-39. She looks forward to visiting Bolivia in 2008 to present the translations of her books based on her research in the mining communities now in press with Antropofoga, Buenos Aires. These include: Comimos la mina y la mina nos come: Dependencia y exploitación en las comunidades mineras de Bolivia; He agotado mi vida en la mina, and Vida y muerte en la comunidad minera. She will present her reflections on past and current fieldwork to the University of Buenos Aires study group, Jornadas de Antropologia in November, 2008.

She has taught at Yale University and New York University. She has published extensively on her work in Chiapas, Mexico with Mayas in the late 1950s and 1960s and return field stays in 1990 to the present. Her work in tin mining communities of Bolivia from 1969 to l984 is published in Spanish and English as well as a documentary film of the same title Her engagement in feminist and working class movements, resulted in several co-editing several anthologies in the l980s when she was engated in field research on the military industrial complex during the Reagan years as it was played out in the General Electric plant. She returned to Chiapas to record the transition from semisubsistence economy of cultivators and artisans to producers in a world market in the 1990s. Soon after the uptrising of Maya migrants to the Lacandon rainforest burst into global headlines and is played out the ensuring conflict as Mayan claims for pluricultural autonomy are countered by state counterinsurgency Her return study of General Electric workers in Pittsfield was the basis for interviews for the present article. Her interest in the comparative study of social movements in the process of globalization is expressed in recently published books Social Movements and Practicing Ethnography in a Global World. She continues to revisit field sites in Chiapas, Guatemala, and the United States, publishing articles on ecology and alternative development. She anticipates a visit to Buenos Aires to address theoretical and methodological issues of the last half century.