For Immediate Release—Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Contact:
Mary E. McCrank
Media Relations Officer
(585) 245-5516
SUNY Geneseo Anthropology Professor Ellen Kintz Receives
Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad Program Grant
Monthlong study in Brazil comes after 27th
trip to Mexico
GENESEO,
N.Y.—Ellen Kintz, professor and chair of anthropology at the State
University of New York at Geneseo, has been awarded a 2007 Fulbright-Hays
Seminars Abroad Program grant to travel and study in Brazil this summer.
Kintz received confirmation in late February from the J.
William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and the Secretary of Education of
her selection as a participant in the U.S. Department of Education.
The Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad Program is designed to
help U.S. educators and administrators in humanities, languages or area studies
enhance their international understanding and knowledge of the people and
culture of another country.
Kintz will spend the month of July in Brazil touring various
regions—including the Amazon, Pantanel and Bahia—and attending a
seminar titled "Learning the Land: How Sustainable Development Can Build a
Strong Educational Foundation."
"It will allow me to do a quantum leap forward in terms of
my experience as a teacher-scholar, and I'll be able to share that with my
students," said Kintz, who teaches about Latin America, anthropological
research methods, ethics and social sciences. Her teachings primarily have
focused on Mexico, Maya and the Andes, but this trip will allow her to
incorporate Brazil into her courses.
"As an anthropologist, I know about Brazil, but I'd like to
know more," she said, adding this will be her second trip to the country and
will allow her to explore environmental zones and look at new patterns of
sustainable development in the country. She visited Brazil a couple of years
ago as part of an Earthwatch Institute trip.
"That's the thing anthropologists do," said Kintz. "I want
to look and see what the sustainable projects are doing. I want to see how
people react to it."
Kintz, of Geneseo, joined the Geneseo faculty in 1979 as an
assistant professor. In 1989, she was promoted to associate professor, and in
1996 she was promoted to professor. She earned her bachelor's degree in
anthropology from The American University in Washington, D.C., and her master's
degree and doctorate in anthropology from SUNY at Stony Brook.
College officials are delighted Kintz has been recognized
for her work.
"I was extremely pleased to hear
that Dr. Ellen Kintz had been awarded a competitive Fulbright-Hays Award. She
is an outstanding member of our Geneseo faculty and her focus on Latin American
and Mesoamerican cultures adds tremendously to our students' understanding of anthropology,
peoples and cultures," said Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs
Katherine Conway-Turner. "I am positive that her work in Brazil through the
Fulbright-Hays will add another extraordinary dimension to her understanding of
cultures. I congratulate Dr. Kintz on yet another acknowledgment of her superb
work and her continued growth as a teacher-scholar."
Kintz has loved exploring since she was a child when her
parents would take her and her older sister on trips to Europe, Mexico and Canada
and across America. Her father was an adventurous traveler while her mother
ensured the family followed cautious paths, she recalled about the family trips
that would help shape the course of her life.
"He read about all these places he wanted to go," said
Kintz. "He thought that was a way to expand your horizons so you didn't have to
live in such a narrow band."
From Mexico to Brazil
In keeping with family tradition to travel, Kintz has
completed 26 field trips since 1975 to the rural village of Coba, located in
the state of Quintana Roo in the Yucatan Peninsula of the southeastern coastal
region of Mexico to research pre-Columbian Maya and contemporary Maya living in
the Yucatan. Her primary fieldwork has targeted the Maya living in Cob‡. During
these trips, Kintz has worked with students, archaeologists, local Maya men and
women, herbalists, traditional curers, elders and children.
Her first trip to Coba was as a National Geographic
archeologist to research the area's magnificent Maya ruins. At that time, she
met village resident Nicholas Caamal Canche, with whom she has been working
with him ever since. Throughout the decades, Kintz's research has evolved from
archeology to anthropology to sustainable gardening. Her areas of scholarly
interest have included sexism, racism and poverty. Today, she helps the Coba
women develop and maintain kitchen gardens to grow vegetables and medicinal
herbs.
In the 1990s, Kintz began working with the villagers to
create a small-scale sustainable agricultural plan for the families to improve
the food supply and children nutrition. Her extensive work there helped her
obtain a $19,000 grant in 2002 from the Rochester-based Dorothy Haus Ross
Foundation for work on kitchen gardens in Mexico. Kintz and her students have helped
plant 1,500 fruit trees in the village—mostly citrus, but she will begin
planting indigenous trees this May.
This week, during Geneseo's spring break, Kintz is on her 27th
trip to Coba. The March trip is one of three annual visits she makes to the village,
located about two hours from the resort Cancun. Kintz takes eight students each
March for a weeklong trip and six to eight students in January and June for a
two-week visit. The weather in January and June allows the Geneseo group to do
biodiversity projects in the village. During the March trip, Kintz takes
students to nine archaeological sites, including a monkey preserve, colonial
period haciendas and churches as part of the course "Art: Architecture and
Archaeology." The Geneseo group always works in Coba, helping families.
Kintz's photographs of her visits to Coba have been featured
in the college's art galleries, showing what it is like for the families and
children, who face numerous hardships but work together to ensure the children
are fed and clothed.
"They're at the very bottom of the economic ladder," she
said. One "external force"—such as a hurricane hitting the village, a
child becoming ill or the death of a husband—can force villagers to stay
in poverty, she explained. To ensure safe housing, it would cost a family $800
to cover their home with stucco, an expense that seems minimal to most
Americans but is exorbitant to Coba villagers.
Despite being economically poor, the villagers are socially
rich, she said. According to Kintz, the reverse can be found in America: people
are economically rich but socially poor, lacking the networks found in
tight-knit communities such as Coba. Each time she visits, Kintz brings
clothing for the villagers, in particular children from newborn to age 10. She
collects clothing from Geneseo students, faculty and staff and is constantly
seeking donations.
"We have to think about how wealthy we are in terms of the
world, and we have to be more proactive," said Kintz. "My experience as an
anthropologist has changed my way of thinking forever."
Kintz has been invited to present her research and findings
on Mexico during EcoSummit 2007, which will be held May 22-27 in Beijing. This
year, the summit will focus on integrative aspects of all ecological science and
its application under the general theme of "Ecological Complexity and
Sustainability: Challenges and Opportunities for 21st-Century's Ecology."
Kintz has applied for a grant from the National Endowment of
the Humanities to sponsor a four-week seminar in the Yucatan in summer 2008.
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