Carol Hendrickson— Anthropology
Carol Hendrickson, Professor of Anthropology, has been researching weaving in the central highlands of Guatemala for
more than twenty-five years. An expert on traje (Maya dress), her research focuses on the ways clothing non-verbally
relates cultural meanings and provides insight into local understandings of issues such as ethnicity, gender, class,
politics, and national identity. In addition to collecting material via interviews, participant observations and photography,
Carol has recently begun taking visual field notes along with traditionally written observations. Her recent writing
argues for visual field notes as an important means for seeing - in the double sense of observing and understanding -
in the field.
Carol's book, Weaving Identities: Construction of Dress and Self in a Highland Guatemala Town (University of Texas Press), was selected by Choice as one of the best new books in anthropology in 1995. With Edward Fischer she co-wrote Tecpán Guatemala: A Modern Maya Town in Global and Local Context (Westview, 2002), which is currently being translated for publication in Spanish. In 1999 Carol was awarded a coveted Fulbright-Hays faculty research grant for research in Guatemala. She has recently given presentations at the American Anthropological Association meetings and for a National Endowment for the Humanities faculty institute, and has been a participant in a workshop with the Japan Studies Association. She is also Director of World Studies at Marlboro.
According to Carol, the study of anthropology is important "because it teaches us that, culturally speaking, we're not the only game in town." In the classroom she likes to teach her students how to "learn to question our assumptions about our own world and also come to understand the logic of worlds that initially might seem very strange." Carol believes that this permits her students to see other people’s lives, not to mention their own, "with fresh eyes."
B.S., Bates College, 1971; M.A., University of Chicago, 1979, 1983; Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1986; Marlboro, 1989 -