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Severin M. Fowles
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Severin M. Fowles in an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College. In addition to his teaching duties for the Anthropology Department, Professor Fowles is associated with Barnard's American Studies Program. His teaching at Barnard includes such courses as "Anthropological Theory I," "Origins of Human Society," and "Native North America."
As an anthropological archaeologist, Professor Fowles is interested in the deep histories of human societies and the materiality of social life. His research is based in northern New Mexico where he has conducted excavations, regional surveys, and archival research in order to better understand the social transformations involved in the evolution of large village communities during the last millennium. He places particular emphasis on transformations related to ritual practice and religious organization. The Pueblo peoples in this region are well known ethnographically for their elaborate priesthoods. Professor Fowles seeks to understand how and why these priesthoods have been constructed and contested over time. Recently his research and writing have shifted from the study of theocratic organization toward questions related to taboo, iconography, the archaeological study of immateriality, and the relationship between landscape and cosmology.
Professor Fowles has initiated a multi-year archaeological survey of the Rio Grande gorge, a dramatic fissure in the earth that has long exerted a strong influence on local thought and movement in northern New Mexico. This survey has been designed to examine the deep historical engagement with the gorge from its earliest Archaic occupation some seven millennia ago, through to its contemporary significance as a place of seclusion, spiritualism, and, increasingly, suicide.
Selected Publications
The Making of Made People: Evolution of a Pueblo Hierocracy (Santa Fe School of American Research Press, In preparation).
"Steps Toward and Archaeology of Taboo," Religion in the Material World, L. Fogelin ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, In press).
"Clay, Conflict and Village Aggregation: Compositional Analyses of Pre-Classic Pottery in the Taos District, New Mexico," American Antiquity (In press).
"Our Father (Our Mother): Gender Ideology, Praxis, and Marginalization in Pueblo Religion," Engaged Anthropology, M. Hegmon and B. Sunday Eiselt eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
"Historical Contingency and the Prehistoric Foundations of Eastern Pueblo Moiety Organization," Journal of Anthropological Research Vol. 61, No. 1 (2005).
"Tewa versus Tiwa: settlement patterns and social history in the northern Rio Grande, AD 1275-1540," The Protohistoric Pueblo World, AD 1275-1600, E. Charles Adams and Andrew Duff eds. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004): 17–25.
"Inequality and Egalitarian Rebellion: a Tribal Dialectic in Tonga History," The Archaeology of Tribal Societies, W. Parkinson ed. (Ann Arbor: International Monographs in Prehistory, 2002): 74–96.
"From Social Type to Social Process: Placing 'Tribe' in a Historical Framework," The Archaeology of Tribal Societies, W. Parkinson ed. (Ann Arbor: International Monographs in Prehistory, 2002): 13–33.
212-854-0092
EDUCATION:
PhD, Michigan
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SPECIALIZATION:
Archaeological anthropology