Dean E Arnold
Dean E. Arnold (PhD University of Illinois-Urbana) has done field work in Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala and the Southwest and has published six books, two co-edited books, and more than 60 articles and book chapters about potters, pottery production, and related subjects (such as Maya Blue), among them the highly regarded seminal work, Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process (Cambridge University Press, 1985). Dr. Arnold was a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico and Peru, and was a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, in 1985 and a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Archeology there in 1985, 1992, and 2000. He received the Society for American Archaeology’s Award for Excellence in Ceramic Studies in 1996. In 2003, he received the Charles R. Jenkins Award for Distinguished Achievement from the National Executive Council of Lambda Alpha, the National Collegiate Honor Society for Anthropology, and received the Wheaton College Senior Faculty Scholarship Achievement Award in 2001. In 2008, he received the Wheaton College Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Service to Alma Mater.
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Books by Dean E Arnold
This first-person narrative reveals the challenges of living and working in another culture and the many obstacles one can encounter while doing field research. Arnold shares how his feelings of frustration and perceived failure led him to refocus his project, a shift that ultimately led to an entirely new perspective on pottery production in the Andes. Masterfully weaving details about Peru’s geography, ecology, history, prehistory, and culture into his story, he chronicles his change from small-town Midwesterner to a person of much broader vision, newly aware of his North American views and values.
Retracing Inca Steps is an excellent read for the lay person wishing to learn about the environment, prehistory, history, and culture of Peru as well as for students wanting to know more about the joys and rigors of fieldwork.
This book is also available as an audio book on Audible from Amazon.com.
University of Utah Press book launched the book (55 min) with Dr. William P. Mitchell on a video:
https://youtu.be/jJ8DpX7stlc
A ten minute summary of the book by the author can be viewed on this video:
https://youtu.be/u0dJOpxOkR8
Following Lambros Malafouris, Tim Ingold, and Colin Renfrew, Arnold argues that potters’ indigenous knowledge is not just in their minds but extends to their engagement with the environment, raw materials, and the pottery-making process itself and is recursively affected by visual and tactile feedback. Pottery is not just an expression of a mental template but also involves the interaction of cognitive categories, embodied muscular patterns, and the engagement of those categories and skills with the production process. Indigenous knowledge is thus a product of the interaction of mind and material, of mental categories and action, and of cognition and sensory engagement—the interaction of both human and material agency.
Engagement theory has become an important theoretical approach and “indigenous knowledge” (as cultural heritage) is the focus of much current research in anthropology, archaeology, and cultural resource management. While Dean Arnold’s previous work has been significant in ceramic ethnoarchaeology, Maya Potters' Indigenous Knowledge goes further, providing new evidence and opening up different concepts and approaches to understanding practical processes. It will be of interest to a wide variety of researchers in Maya studies, material culture, material sciences, ceramic ecology, and ethnoarchaeology.
This book is now in paperback.
This book traces the history of potters and their production units for more than four decades. As a follow up to Social Change and the Evolution of Ceramic Production and Distribution, it focuses on a narrative history of pottery making families and their production units, and how they have changed between 1965 and 2008. Again, household production has a deep history in Ticul, but other types of production units have come and gone. Illustrated with over a hundred images of production units, the narrative indicates that the physical sizes of production units have gotten larger over time even though the mean number of potters per production over the same period has not significantly increased. Potters have intensified their craft by building structures to shield production from the damaging effects of rainfall and hurricanes and thus increased their production unit footprint.
Contributors from a variety of backgrounds in these fields explore what ceramics can reveal about ancient social dynamics, trade, ritual, politics, innovation, iconography, and regional styles. Essays identify supernatural and humanistic beliefs through formal analysis of Lower Mississippi Valley "great serpent" effigy vessels, costume and dress in Moche art, and Ecuadorian depictions of the human figure. They discuss the cultural identity conveyed by imagery such as Andean head motifs, and they analyze symmetry in designs from locations including the American Southwest. Chapters also take diachronic approaches—methods that track change over time—to ceramics from Mexico’s Tarascan State and the Valley of Oaxaca, as well as from Maya and Toltec societies.
This volume provides a much-needed multidisciplinary synthesis of current scholarship on Ancient American ceramics. It is a model of how different research perspectives can together illuminate the relationship between these material artifacts and their broader cultural contexts.
"In its broad topical and geographical scope, this volume demonstrates the many ways scholars can productively study ancient ceramics and the diversity of questions their studies can address."—Christopher A. Pool, coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology
"Expansive in scope, including cases spanning millennia and traversing North, Central, and South America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays demonstrates that ceramic objects, all too often marginalized as minor arts or the fodder of stratigraphic seriation, reward close and deep study."—Bryan R. Just, author of Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom
Dean E. Arnold made ten visits to Ticul, Yucatan, Mexico, witnessing the changes in transportation infrastructure, the use of piped water, and the development of tourist resorts. Even in this context of social change and changes in the demand for pottery, most of the potters in 1997 came from the families that had made pottery in 1965. This book traces changes and continuities in that population of potters, in the demand and distribution of pottery, and in the procurement of clay and temper, paste composition, forming, and firing.
In this volume, Arnold bridges the gap between archaeology and ethnography, using his analysis of contemporary ceramic production and distribution to generate new theoretical explanations for archaeologists working with pottery from antiquity. When the descriptions and explanations of Arnold's findings in Ticul are placed in the context of the literature on craft specialization, a number of insights can be applied to the archaeological record that confirm, contradict, and nuance generalizations concerning the evolution of ceramic specialization. This book will be of special interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnoarchaeologists, ethnographers, and those scholars interested in social change and ceramic production.
Although addressing the theme of how production and distribution changes through a period of 32 years, the work is placed in the context of the parameters of craft production and specialization by Costin addressing its strengths and weaknesses. Several chapters are organized as critiques of current theories of technological choice that potters can make any vessel using any technique (van der Leeuw) and whether elite control of ceramic raw materials results in a standardized paste (Rice). One of the more interesting conclusions from the book is that in spite of massive social changes during the last third of the twentieth century, pottery production is still largely organized by households, and the learning and residence of potters still largely conforms to a kin-based model, although such patterns are highly nuanced. The work also shows that different aspects of ceramic production changes at different rates, and one of the consequences of change is the break-up of ceramic production into specialized tasks over time. Throughout the book, the implications of the work for the study of ancient ceramic production is discussed.
This is a unique book that chronicles long-term change in ceramic production, and distribution thrugh the last third of the twentieth century, and shows the implication of these data to the study of ceramic production and cultural change in antiquity.
(The Table of Contents and the Introduction to the book can be accessed from the publisher's website for the book. Interested parties should click on the link (upcolorado.com) above, and then click on "TOC and sample chapter" at the bottom ("Download Attachments") of the ad the book.)
Pottery making in Quinua must be understood in light of the environmental, geographical, and historic context of the Ayacucho Valley that recognized that pottery production in Quinua was not only located in a context of abundant and diverse ceramic resources, but the Ayacucho Valley was critical as the main route for human populations through the south central Andes. Agricultural land around Quinua was limited, highly eroded, with limited access to irrigation, and limited and often unpredictable rainfall, especially in the lower parts of the slope.
Within this context, Quinua potters produced pottery for utilitarian uses such as cooking, water storage, food storage, chicha-making and storage, and ritual. Quinua vessels also materialize ideological and mythological themes. Potters use two pastes, one especially suited for use on the fire, and another tempered with the abundant volcanic ash exposed through erosion in the slopes below the village.
Within this context, potters decorated their pottery in a way that the symmetry patterns reflect the social structural principles in the community. Such patterns, although most frequent, show considerable variability, and reflect a variety of choices for decoration: design fields, design structure, design motifs although the symmetry analysis of the pottery design reveal that certain symmetry types have a high frequency.
This volume shows both the environment and historical factors that affect pottery production, but also reveals the technological choices in vessel shapes and design can be quite variable. The book is a bridge between my early work with what is now called technical choices of raw materials and designs, and a desire to get beyond such a culturally-relative approach to understanding patterns that can be applied more widely cross-culturally. Yes, potters do make choices and have a wide variety of raw materials available, but there are broader patterns one can use to understand pottery production world-wide.
At the end of the volume, the book argues that the expansion of Wari pottery during the Middle Horizon was a response by local inhabitants to a drier climate that favored pottery production over agriculture.
Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process was born out of frustration, and the ideas largely came out of my own experience. I had studied pottery making in Mexico, Peru and Guatemala, but I found that my research in one area had not helped me understand pottery production very much in another. The book thus was an attempt to provide cross-cultural evidence for the relationships between ceramic production, on the one hand, and the environment and the rest of culture, on the other. I was particularly concerned about articulating the relationship of ceramic production to the environment, not as a deterministic, uni-causal explanation, but as an attempt to restore a neglected perspective to a craft that has significant environmental links that transcend the obvious: “Raw materials are necessary to make pots.” Rather, many anthropologists believed in kind of cultural determinism that potter imprints his culture on the plastic clay. Besides the frustration with culturally-relative decision trees (now called ‘technological choice’), and construction grammars that I presented in earlier work, I wanted to explore those relationships with the environment and culture that transcended pottery production in individual societies that followed from the relatively fixed production sequence of making pots used in any culture that practiced the craft.
These relationships were regarded as multi-causal feedback mechanisms that both affect ceramic production and are affected by it. In retrospect, there two kinds of these mechanisms. One type involves the engagement of the potter with the selection of the raw materials, and the process of mixing the paste, and building a pot. These choices are not fixed, immutable cultural choices, but are negotiated in the pottery making process from the selection of raw materials to the firing of the finished vessels, based upon varying raw materials and the conditions of weather and climate. A second type of feedback involves the relationships of pottery and its production to the larger cultural patterns, and vice versa. The beginning of pottery in antiquity, for example, is a multi-causal process, but what role did pottery make in the detoxification of domesticated plants that lay at the base of agriculturally-based subsistence and settled life? Research on skeletal material from some of these early settlements has shown that disease was a fact of life in these communities. Did the adoption of pottery provide a selective factor in the survival of early settled communities because pottery detoxified domestic plants, made them palatable, and facilitated storage of seasonally abundant crops into the time of scarcity?
This book also provides much food for thought for those involved with ‘engagement theory’ because it recognizes and describes those mutually-causal relationships between pottery production, and the environment and culture. Such relationships, as described in the book, and elaborated elsewhere in my work are not deterministic, but rather dynamic, mutually-causal relationships (for example, Social Change and the Evolution of Ceramic Production and Distribution in a Maya Community, University Press of Colorado, 2008). Such widespread patterns are not necessarily universal, but they are world-wide generalizations, often with highly contextual and sometimes predictable variations. Archaeology and anthropology are built upon such generalizations in their interpretations of human behavior. This book was written as an attempt to contribute to such interpretations in an attempt to bring them more in line with the realities of ceramic production based upon the world-wide contextual evidence of making pottery. In a thirty-year retrospective of this work, I see that it represents what is now called 'material agency' by Malafouris in "How Things Shape the Mind" (MIT Press, 2013). This agency flows out of the engagement of the potter with the materials, the potter making process, weather, and sedentariness, and I called it feedback in this work.
(Unfortunately, this book is not available in electronic format, but is still is in print and both new and used copies are available on Amazon.com and other booksellers.)
Papers by Dean E Arnold
The notion of standardization in pottery production has been used as an indicator of ceramic specialization. Yet, this notion and the assumptions behind it are still largely untested ethnographically. This paper attempts to identify some factors that affect the standardization of ceramic vessel shapes in Ticul, Yucatan, Mexico. Twenty-eight percent of a total of 1671 ethnographic vessels of 16 shapes were measured and analyzed statistically. Interpretation of these analyses within the ethnographic context of the workshop industry in Ticul provides insight into the factors associated with variability in dimensional uniformity as a function of market, technique, and the potter's own views of standardization. In caution, we suggest that the coefficient of variation should not supplant the use of the standard deviation as an expression of standardization.
Mark Noll decries the lack of an evangelical mind in the academy, and challenges evangelical Christians to consider the importance of the cultivation of the mind as a divine calling. Unfortunately, the Christian mind in anthropology lags behind many disciplines because, among other reasons, there are so few Christian anthropologists. Why is this? According to a Carnegie Foundation survey, anthropology is the most secular of the disciplines. It has a record of hostility to Christianity that is borne out by the experiences by many evangelical Christians. This essay elaborates some of the tensions between anthropology and Christianity and provides a response to some of these tensions. It suggests that evangelical Christians can influence the academy by immersing themselves in it and by pursuing pure research rather than just focusing on more applied concerns such as missions, development and the church.
(In some respects, this article is out-of-date, and is not reflected for those in the sub discipline of cultural anthropology called 'Anthropology of Religion'. The sub-fields of anthropology are often silos with little communication between them. Since the time this article was written (early 2000's) and reading it again, it still rings true for me after with more data, examples, and experiences to support it.)
This first-person narrative reveals the challenges of living and working in another culture and the many obstacles one can encounter while doing field research. Arnold shares how his feelings of frustration and perceived failure led him to refocus his project, a shift that ultimately led to an entirely new perspective on pottery production in the Andes. Masterfully weaving details about Peru’s geography, ecology, history, prehistory, and culture into his story, he chronicles his change from small-town Midwesterner to a person of much broader vision, newly aware of his North American views and values.
Retracing Inca Steps is an excellent read for the lay person wishing to learn about the environment, prehistory, history, and culture of Peru as well as for students wanting to know more about the joys and rigors of fieldwork.
This book is also available as an audio book on Audible from Amazon.com.
University of Utah Press book launched the book (55 min) with Dr. William P. Mitchell on a video:
https://youtu.be/jJ8DpX7stlc
A ten minute summary of the book by the author can be viewed on this video:
https://youtu.be/u0dJOpxOkR8
Following Lambros Malafouris, Tim Ingold, and Colin Renfrew, Arnold argues that potters’ indigenous knowledge is not just in their minds but extends to their engagement with the environment, raw materials, and the pottery-making process itself and is recursively affected by visual and tactile feedback. Pottery is not just an expression of a mental template but also involves the interaction of cognitive categories, embodied muscular patterns, and the engagement of those categories and skills with the production process. Indigenous knowledge is thus a product of the interaction of mind and material, of mental categories and action, and of cognition and sensory engagement—the interaction of both human and material agency.
Engagement theory has become an important theoretical approach and “indigenous knowledge” (as cultural heritage) is the focus of much current research in anthropology, archaeology, and cultural resource management. While Dean Arnold’s previous work has been significant in ceramic ethnoarchaeology, Maya Potters' Indigenous Knowledge goes further, providing new evidence and opening up different concepts and approaches to understanding practical processes. It will be of interest to a wide variety of researchers in Maya studies, material culture, material sciences, ceramic ecology, and ethnoarchaeology.
This book is now in paperback.
This book traces the history of potters and their production units for more than four decades. As a follow up to Social Change and the Evolution of Ceramic Production and Distribution, it focuses on a narrative history of pottery making families and their production units, and how they have changed between 1965 and 2008. Again, household production has a deep history in Ticul, but other types of production units have come and gone. Illustrated with over a hundred images of production units, the narrative indicates that the physical sizes of production units have gotten larger over time even though the mean number of potters per production over the same period has not significantly increased. Potters have intensified their craft by building structures to shield production from the damaging effects of rainfall and hurricanes and thus increased their production unit footprint.
Contributors from a variety of backgrounds in these fields explore what ceramics can reveal about ancient social dynamics, trade, ritual, politics, innovation, iconography, and regional styles. Essays identify supernatural and humanistic beliefs through formal analysis of Lower Mississippi Valley "great serpent" effigy vessels, costume and dress in Moche art, and Ecuadorian depictions of the human figure. They discuss the cultural identity conveyed by imagery such as Andean head motifs, and they analyze symmetry in designs from locations including the American Southwest. Chapters also take diachronic approaches—methods that track change over time—to ceramics from Mexico’s Tarascan State and the Valley of Oaxaca, as well as from Maya and Toltec societies.
This volume provides a much-needed multidisciplinary synthesis of current scholarship on Ancient American ceramics. It is a model of how different research perspectives can together illuminate the relationship between these material artifacts and their broader cultural contexts.
"In its broad topical and geographical scope, this volume demonstrates the many ways scholars can productively study ancient ceramics and the diversity of questions their studies can address."—Christopher A. Pool, coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology
"Expansive in scope, including cases spanning millennia and traversing North, Central, and South America, this interdisciplinary collection of essays demonstrates that ceramic objects, all too often marginalized as minor arts or the fodder of stratigraphic seriation, reward close and deep study."—Bryan R. Just, author of Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom
Dean E. Arnold made ten visits to Ticul, Yucatan, Mexico, witnessing the changes in transportation infrastructure, the use of piped water, and the development of tourist resorts. Even in this context of social change and changes in the demand for pottery, most of the potters in 1997 came from the families that had made pottery in 1965. This book traces changes and continuities in that population of potters, in the demand and distribution of pottery, and in the procurement of clay and temper, paste composition, forming, and firing.
In this volume, Arnold bridges the gap between archaeology and ethnography, using his analysis of contemporary ceramic production and distribution to generate new theoretical explanations for archaeologists working with pottery from antiquity. When the descriptions and explanations of Arnold's findings in Ticul are placed in the context of the literature on craft specialization, a number of insights can be applied to the archaeological record that confirm, contradict, and nuance generalizations concerning the evolution of ceramic specialization. This book will be of special interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnoarchaeologists, ethnographers, and those scholars interested in social change and ceramic production.
Although addressing the theme of how production and distribution changes through a period of 32 years, the work is placed in the context of the parameters of craft production and specialization by Costin addressing its strengths and weaknesses. Several chapters are organized as critiques of current theories of technological choice that potters can make any vessel using any technique (van der Leeuw) and whether elite control of ceramic raw materials results in a standardized paste (Rice). One of the more interesting conclusions from the book is that in spite of massive social changes during the last third of the twentieth century, pottery production is still largely organized by households, and the learning and residence of potters still largely conforms to a kin-based model, although such patterns are highly nuanced. The work also shows that different aspects of ceramic production changes at different rates, and one of the consequences of change is the break-up of ceramic production into specialized tasks over time. Throughout the book, the implications of the work for the study of ancient ceramic production is discussed.
This is a unique book that chronicles long-term change in ceramic production, and distribution thrugh the last third of the twentieth century, and shows the implication of these data to the study of ceramic production and cultural change in antiquity.
(The Table of Contents and the Introduction to the book can be accessed from the publisher's website for the book. Interested parties should click on the link (upcolorado.com) above, and then click on "TOC and sample chapter" at the bottom ("Download Attachments") of the ad the book.)
Pottery making in Quinua must be understood in light of the environmental, geographical, and historic context of the Ayacucho Valley that recognized that pottery production in Quinua was not only located in a context of abundant and diverse ceramic resources, but the Ayacucho Valley was critical as the main route for human populations through the south central Andes. Agricultural land around Quinua was limited, highly eroded, with limited access to irrigation, and limited and often unpredictable rainfall, especially in the lower parts of the slope.
Within this context, Quinua potters produced pottery for utilitarian uses such as cooking, water storage, food storage, chicha-making and storage, and ritual. Quinua vessels also materialize ideological and mythological themes. Potters use two pastes, one especially suited for use on the fire, and another tempered with the abundant volcanic ash exposed through erosion in the slopes below the village.
Within this context, potters decorated their pottery in a way that the symmetry patterns reflect the social structural principles in the community. Such patterns, although most frequent, show considerable variability, and reflect a variety of choices for decoration: design fields, design structure, design motifs although the symmetry analysis of the pottery design reveal that certain symmetry types have a high frequency.
This volume shows both the environment and historical factors that affect pottery production, but also reveals the technological choices in vessel shapes and design can be quite variable. The book is a bridge between my early work with what is now called technical choices of raw materials and designs, and a desire to get beyond such a culturally-relative approach to understanding patterns that can be applied more widely cross-culturally. Yes, potters do make choices and have a wide variety of raw materials available, but there are broader patterns one can use to understand pottery production world-wide.
At the end of the volume, the book argues that the expansion of Wari pottery during the Middle Horizon was a response by local inhabitants to a drier climate that favored pottery production over agriculture.
Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process was born out of frustration, and the ideas largely came out of my own experience. I had studied pottery making in Mexico, Peru and Guatemala, but I found that my research in one area had not helped me understand pottery production very much in another. The book thus was an attempt to provide cross-cultural evidence for the relationships between ceramic production, on the one hand, and the environment and the rest of culture, on the other. I was particularly concerned about articulating the relationship of ceramic production to the environment, not as a deterministic, uni-causal explanation, but as an attempt to restore a neglected perspective to a craft that has significant environmental links that transcend the obvious: “Raw materials are necessary to make pots.” Rather, many anthropologists believed in kind of cultural determinism that potter imprints his culture on the plastic clay. Besides the frustration with culturally-relative decision trees (now called ‘technological choice’), and construction grammars that I presented in earlier work, I wanted to explore those relationships with the environment and culture that transcended pottery production in individual societies that followed from the relatively fixed production sequence of making pots used in any culture that practiced the craft.
These relationships were regarded as multi-causal feedback mechanisms that both affect ceramic production and are affected by it. In retrospect, there two kinds of these mechanisms. One type involves the engagement of the potter with the selection of the raw materials, and the process of mixing the paste, and building a pot. These choices are not fixed, immutable cultural choices, but are negotiated in the pottery making process from the selection of raw materials to the firing of the finished vessels, based upon varying raw materials and the conditions of weather and climate. A second type of feedback involves the relationships of pottery and its production to the larger cultural patterns, and vice versa. The beginning of pottery in antiquity, for example, is a multi-causal process, but what role did pottery make in the detoxification of domesticated plants that lay at the base of agriculturally-based subsistence and settled life? Research on skeletal material from some of these early settlements has shown that disease was a fact of life in these communities. Did the adoption of pottery provide a selective factor in the survival of early settled communities because pottery detoxified domestic plants, made them palatable, and facilitated storage of seasonally abundant crops into the time of scarcity?
This book also provides much food for thought for those involved with ‘engagement theory’ because it recognizes and describes those mutually-causal relationships between pottery production, and the environment and culture. Such relationships, as described in the book, and elaborated elsewhere in my work are not deterministic, but rather dynamic, mutually-causal relationships (for example, Social Change and the Evolution of Ceramic Production and Distribution in a Maya Community, University Press of Colorado, 2008). Such widespread patterns are not necessarily universal, but they are world-wide generalizations, often with highly contextual and sometimes predictable variations. Archaeology and anthropology are built upon such generalizations in their interpretations of human behavior. This book was written as an attempt to contribute to such interpretations in an attempt to bring them more in line with the realities of ceramic production based upon the world-wide contextual evidence of making pottery. In a thirty-year retrospective of this work, I see that it represents what is now called 'material agency' by Malafouris in "How Things Shape the Mind" (MIT Press, 2013). This agency flows out of the engagement of the potter with the materials, the potter making process, weather, and sedentariness, and I called it feedback in this work.
(Unfortunately, this book is not available in electronic format, but is still is in print and both new and used copies are available on Amazon.com and other booksellers.)
The notion of standardization in pottery production has been used as an indicator of ceramic specialization. Yet, this notion and the assumptions behind it are still largely untested ethnographically. This paper attempts to identify some factors that affect the standardization of ceramic vessel shapes in Ticul, Yucatan, Mexico. Twenty-eight percent of a total of 1671 ethnographic vessels of 16 shapes were measured and analyzed statistically. Interpretation of these analyses within the ethnographic context of the workshop industry in Ticul provides insight into the factors associated with variability in dimensional uniformity as a function of market, technique, and the potter's own views of standardization. In caution, we suggest that the coefficient of variation should not supplant the use of the standard deviation as an expression of standardization.
Mark Noll decries the lack of an evangelical mind in the academy, and challenges evangelical Christians to consider the importance of the cultivation of the mind as a divine calling. Unfortunately, the Christian mind in anthropology lags behind many disciplines because, among other reasons, there are so few Christian anthropologists. Why is this? According to a Carnegie Foundation survey, anthropology is the most secular of the disciplines. It has a record of hostility to Christianity that is borne out by the experiences by many evangelical Christians. This essay elaborates some of the tensions between anthropology and Christianity and provides a response to some of these tensions. It suggests that evangelical Christians can influence the academy by immersing themselves in it and by pursuing pure research rather than just focusing on more applied concerns such as missions, development and the church.
(In some respects, this article is out-of-date, and is not reflected for those in the sub discipline of cultural anthropology called 'Anthropology of Religion'. The sub-fields of anthropology are often silos with little communication between them. Since the time this article was written (early 2000's) and reading it again, it still rings true for me after with more data, examples, and experiences to support it.)
Those who know my work will see the foundations to several of my ideas already expressed in published work such as "Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process" (1985), "Social Change and the Evolution of Ceramic Production and Distribution in a Maya Community" (2008), "Ecology and Ceramic Production in an Andean Community" (1993), and “The Ceramic Ecology of the Ayacucho Valley Peru” (1975). The work also parallels the kind of reflexivity and reflection found in “Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process after 25 Years”.
"