Center for
Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Phone:

(812) 855-9099

Email:

qcastane@indiana.edu

Dr. Quetzil Castañeda is a Senior Lecturer in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (fall 2006–present) and Member of the Graduate Faculty at Indiana University.  Quetzil is the founding director of OSEA – the Open School of Ethnography and Anthropology, which is an independent, non-degree school that offers field study abroad and transcultural exchange programs (http://www.osea-cite.org). He has over 20 years of experience conducting research in México on identity politics, heritage, tourism, anthropology of art, ethics, visual ethnography, applied anthropology, language revitalization, and representation.  His interdisciplinary teaching has found home in History, Latino Studies, Latin American Studies, Spanish Literature, Sociology and Anthropology departments and has taught at Princeton, University of Hawai'i, University of Houston, and the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in México.  His publications include In addition to more than thirty articles in leading journals of anthropology, Quetzil’s ethnography of Chichén Itzá, In the Museum of Maya Culture (Univ. Minnesota Press 1996), is recognized as a landmark text in tourism studies, the anthropology of archaeology, and post-structural studies of Maya culture. He has collaborated with archaeologists, historians, and ethnographers in his co-edited studies of Maya identity, Estrategias Identitarias (SEP & OSEA, 2004) and Ethnographic Archaeologies (AltaMira Press, 2008). He is co-filmmaker with Jeff Himpele of the award winning ethnographic film, Incidents of Travel in Chichén Itzá (distributed by DER 1997) that explores Maya New Age spiritualism, tourism and the politics of archaeological heritage.  Quetzil’s areas of expertise include Maya language, Maya culture, México, Guatemala, heritage, tourism, museum studies, ethnography of archaeology, ethnographic fieldwork/methods, New Age spiritualism, histories of anthropology, ethics, Indigeneity, and culture theory. Currently he is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology and developing the first published standard textbooks for English speaking learners of the Maya language.