School of Social and Political Science

Background

I grew up in Washington State in the USA and moved to the UK to study for a PhD in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics before joining the University of Edinburgh in 2013. My research explores the conflicts, collaborations and transformations in contemporary Amazonian social life. My fieldwork with Waorani communities in Ecuador over the past 25 years has focused on memory and violence, language, and environmental activism in response to oil development on Indigenous lands. My work situates current social transformations at the interface of Indigenous Amazonian modes of thought and broader social and political processes in Latin America. I am also interested in collaborative research methods, as well as the gendered and generational aspects of inter-ethnic relations, Indigenous politics and urban migration in Amazonia. Since 2009 I have been involved in a collaborative project to document the Waorani language, Wao-terero, and have written on practices of translation in Amazonian environmental politics.

My first book, Victims and Warriors: Violence, History and Memory in Amazonia (Illinois, 2015), explores Indigenous forms of social memory in relation to colonial and missionary representations of the past, and how past violence figures in Waorani political engagements and inter-generational relations. My second book, Translating Worlds, Defending Land: Collaborations for Indigenous Rights and Environmental Politics in Amazonia (Stanford, 2025), explores how Indigenous peoples’ collaborations with environmentalists and academic researchers are bringing about new possibilities, challenges, and imaginative horizons in contemporary Amazonia. It describes how, whether as environmental leaders or researchers, some young Waorani adults are gaining a powerful political voice as they translate between Indigenous understandings of land and the international language of conservation. The book argues that the alliances, misunderstandings, and conflicts that emerge in these contexts challenge the assumption that productive collaborations reflect--or require--shared purposes. This has important implications for an engaged anthropology open to reconsidering what constitutes ethnographic knowledge and who it is for. 

I am the co-editor, with Luiz Costa, of the The Lowland South American World (2025), a volume featuring the work of 48 authors from around the world, including several Indigenous authors. I have also co-edited two books on contemporary anthropological theory and practice. These include How Do We Know? Evidence, Ethnography, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge (2008, with Liana Chua and Timm Lau) and The Anthropology of Ignorance: Ethnographic Perspectives (2012, with Ann Kelly and Jon Mair). Before joining Social Anthropology in Edinburgh I was a postdoctoral researcher at the CNRS in Paris, and a lecturer and ESRC postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Teaching

I am passionate about teaching anthropology and contribute to a range of theoretical, methodological and regional courses in Edinburgh. I will be teaching on the following courses during the 2025/2026 academic year:

Social Anthropology 2: Key Concepts (Undergraduate)

This is a core second-year course that critically explores the major conceptual contributions and debates in anthropology over the past century. My section of the course focuses on “society” and “culture” as dynamic concepts in anthropology and in many of the social and political worlds we study, and how critiques of these concepts have been central to questioning the foundations of modernist thought. 

Latin American Anthropology (Undergraduate and Postgraduate Taught – MSc)

This honours option course brings anthropological perspectives on the cultural, political, religious and linguistic complexity of Latin America as a world region. My lectures focus on the distinct experiences of the region’s Indigenous peoples and how they are also part of wider Latin American social life – whether in in terms of changing gendered identities, urbanization or environmental politics.

Key Themes in Anthropology (Core course for the Postgraduate Taught MSc Degree)

In this course I introduce our new MSc (Postgraduate) students to some of the major topics and theoretical approaches that have emerged in social anthropology in recent years. My lectures focus on the intimate link between theory and ethnography in past and present anthropological traditions – and how these perspectives address major debates in the contemporary world, whether about human rights, nature and society, globalization or decolonization.

Doing Anthropology: Ethnographic Methods and Practices (Core course for the Postgraduate Taught MSc Degree)

This is a new course to be launched in semester 2 in 2026. I designed it specifically to introduce MSc (Postgraduate) students to the practical aspects of doing ethnographic fieldwork. The idea is to discuss research design, methods and ethics in a wider context of what the practice of anthropology involves within and outside of the university. In addition to lectures and seminars, the course involves students choosing group-based fieldwork projects to be developed over the course of the semester.

I have also recently taught several other courses, including:

Collaborative Anthropology (Undergraduate Honours course)

Anthropology of Language (Undergraduate and Postgraduate Taught – MSc)

Indigenous Peoples of Lowland South America (Undergraduate and Postgraduate Taught – MSc)

In addition to PhD students, every year I supervise undergraduate and postgraduate taught (MSc) dissertations. Students choose their own research topics and I meet with them one-to-one to help them plan their research and write up their findings. Recent projects have included studies of bilingual education and rural to urban migration in China, Muay Thai martial arts training in Scotland and Thailand, and the changing mezcal industry in Mexico – among many others.

Selected publications

Books

2025. Translating Worlds, Defending Land: Collaborations for Indigenous Rights and Environmental Politics in Amazonia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

2025. The Lowland South American World. Co-edited with Luiz Costa. London: Routledge.

2015. Victims and Warriors: Violence, History, and Memory in Amazonia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

2012. The Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach. With Jon Mair and Ann Kelly, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (Culture, Mind and Society Series).

2008. How Do We Know? Evidence, Ethnography and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge. With Liana Chua and Timm Lau, eds. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Journal special issues

2020. Conserving and Extracting Nature: Environmental Politics and Livelihoods in the New “Middle Grounds” of Amazonia (co-edited with R. Elliott Oakley). Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25(2).

Journal articles

2023. "Civilized Elders and Isolated Ancestors: The Multiple Histories of Contemporary Amazonia." Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 19(1): 39-55. 

2020. "'Our Land is Not For Sale!' Contesting Oil and Translating Environmental Politics in Amazonian Ecuador." Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25(2): 301-323.

2020. "Conserving and Extracting Nature: Environmental Politics and Livelihoods in the New “Middle Grounds” of Amazonia." (co-authored with R. Elliott Oakley). Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25(2): 236-247.

2018. "Bodies That Speak: Languages of Differentiation and Becoming in Amazonia. Language and Communication 63: 65-75.

2016. "A Little Bit Christian": Memories of conversion and community in post-Christian Amazonia." American Anthropologist 118(2): 270-283.

2015. "Keep on Changing: Recent Trends in Amazonian Anthropology." Reviews in Anthropology. 44(2): 1-24.

2013. "Lost and Found: Contesting isolation and cultivating contact in Amazonian Ecuador." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 3(3): 195-221.

2012. "Between Friends and Enemies: The Dynamics of Inter-Ethnic Relations in Amazonian Ecuador." With E. Reeve. Ethnohistory. 59(1): 141-162.

2010. "Warriors, Hunters, and Bruce Lee: Gendered Agency and the Transformation of Amazonian Masculinity." American Ethnologist. 37(4): 753-770.

2009. "Remembering the ‘Auca’: Violence and Generational Memory in Amazonian Ecuador." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 15: 719-736.

2009. "Victims and Martyrs: Converging Histories of Violence in Amazonian Anthropology and U.S. Cinema." Anthropology and Humanism. 34(1): 41-50.

2007. "Indigenous Organizations, Oil Development, and the Politics of Egalitarianism." Cambridge Anthropology. 26(2): 34-46.

Book chapters

2025. "Amazonian Environmental Activism at COP26: A Conversation with Uboye Gaba." (with U. Gaba). In C. High and L. Costa, eds. The Lowland South American World. London: Routledge.

2025. "Reimagining Lowland South America: An Introduction." (with L. Costa). In C. High and L. Costa, eds. The Lowland South American World. London: Routledge.

2021. "The Nature of Loss: Ecological Nostalgia and Cultural Politics in Amazonia." In O. Ange and D. Berliner, eds. Ecological Nostalgias: Memory, Affect and Creativity in Times of Ecological Upheavals. Oxford: Berghahn. Pp. 84-106.

2016. "Warriors, Hunters, and Bruce Lee: Gendered Agency and the Transformation of Amazonian Masculinity." In D. Hodgson, ed. The Gender, Culture, and Power Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 253-263.

2015. "Ignorant Bodies and the Dangers of Shamanism in Amazonia." In T. Kirsch and R. Dilley, eds. Regimes of Ignorance: Anthropological perspectives on the reproduction of non-knowledge. Oxford: Berghahn. Pp. 91-114.

2014. "'Like The Ancient Ones': The intercultural Dynamics of Personal biography in Amazonian Ecuador." In S. Oakdale and M. Course, eds. Fluent Selves: Autobiography and personhood in Lowland South America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Pp. 35-68.

2012. "Shamans, Animals, and Enemies: Locating the Human and Non-Human in an Amazonian Cosmos of Alterity." In Personhood in the Shamanic Ecologies of Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia. M. Brightman, V. Grotti and O. Ulturgasheva , eds. Oxford: Berghahn. Pp. 130-135.

2012. "Between Knowing and Being: Ignorance in Anthropology and Amazonian Shamanism." In Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach. J. Mair, C. High and A. Kelly, eds. Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 119-136.

2012. "Making Ignorance an Ethnographic Object." With J. Mair and A. Kelly. In Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach. Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 1-32.

2008. "Introduction: Questions of Evidence." With L. Chua and T. Lau. In How Do We Know? Evidence, Ethnography and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge. Pp. 1-19.

2008. "End of the Spear: Re-imagining Amazonian History and Ethnography through Film." In How Do We Know? Evidence, Ethnography and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge. Pp. 76-96.

Review Articles

2023. Comment on “The Gendering of Anthropological Theory since 2000: Ontology, Semiotics, and Feminism” (Joshua Reno and Britt Halverson). Current Anthropology 64(5): 475-619. 

2010. "Agency and Anthropology." Review article in Ateliers du laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative (LESC). No. 34.