Before the Second World War, most anthropological research in Puerto Rico was led by US anthropologists. The most famous project, The People of Puerto Rico, was directed by American anthropologist Julian Steward and launched the career of renowned scholars such as Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf. Gazing at the Puerto Rican Anthropological Landscape aims to show the development of the anthropological field in Puerto Rico post-WWII by Puerto Rican anthropologists, the so-called native anthropologists.
This book purposely avoids making Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans a problem to study but instead focuses on a wide variety of epistemological and methodological questions related to the study of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans by native anthropologists within local, regional, and global spheres. We posit that the Puerto Rican anthropological landscape transcends the confines of the island of Puerto Rico to encompass its connection and engagement with the world, and it is not limited to the inhabitants of the island of Puerto Rico but embraces members of its diaspora, as well as other groups and ethnicities. On that note, this book seeks to reflect critically on how the field of anthropology (research and teaching) in Puerto Rico has evolved post-WWII to the current debates of the 21st century.
About the Editors
Marisol Ramos is the Subject Librarian for Chicana/o Studies, Latin American and Iberian Studies, and Spanish & Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has been part of several writing projects, from coauthoring a book about creating an archival program with limited resources to collaborating on several book chapters about access to cultural heritage archives and issues of diversity and inclusion in libraries and archives. Some of her works are the co-authored book, Building a Successful Archival Programme: A Practical Approach, the co-authored book chapter “Puerto Rico’s archival traditions in the context of colonialism,” in Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader and “Identity and Inclusion in the Archives: Challenges of Documenting One’s Own Community” in Through the Archival Looking Glass: A Reader on Diversity and Inclusion. Her other area of research interest is Spanish literature in 19th-century Puerto Rico. In this area she has published the article “La visión de la nación puertorriqueña dentro del marco del romanticismo, el cosmopolitismo y la modernidad de Alejandro Tapia y Rivera” in Caribbean Studies in 2018 and in 2024 she obtained her Ph.D. in Spanish literature from the University of Connecticut with the dissertation “La nación del porvenir: La literatura fundacional cosmopolita de Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1823-1882).”
Manuel Valdés Pizzini is a Professor Emeritus (2023) from the Department of Anthropology and Sociology the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez (UPRM). He is currently the Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Center for Coastal Studies (Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios del Litoral, CIEL) at UPRM. His research focuses on the human-ecosystem interface, with special attention to the use of coastal and marine resources, species, and habitats, underscoring the socio-ecological and historical perspective. Valdés-Pizzini is the author and co-author of several articles on Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK), marine protected areas, coastal communities, fisheries, and the history of fishing gear. His research interests also covered the use of tropical forests from an ethnographic and historical perspective. Valdés Pizzini is the co-author of People, Habitats, Species, and Governance: An Assessment of the Social-ecological System of La Parguera, Puerto Rico (2014, with Michelle T. Schärer-Umpierre), Una mirada al mundo de los pescadores en Puerto Rico: Una mirada global (2011), La transformación del paisaje puertorriqueño y la disciplina del Cuerpo Civil de Conservación, 1933–1942 (2011, with Michael González and José Eduardo Martínez), and Fishers at Work, Workers at Sea (2002, with David Griffith)