My Biography
Jim Weil (PhD, Columbia, 1980) is an expert in Latin America, with the thematic orientation expanding over the course of his career from ecological anthropology to include political economy and expressive culture, all within the framework of the anthropology of work. Dr. Weil has conducted fieldwork for his dissertation research among Quechua pioneer coca cultivators in the tropical forest of eastern Bolivia in the mid-1970s–brief follow-up in the mid-1980s, when the cocaine trade and impact of the so-called “war on drugs” made further fieldwork impossible. He has conducted ongoing research since the early-1990s in a Costa Rican ceramic artisan community, with yearly visits to track changes in the ethnic arts & souvenir market and work up the ancient and more recent history of the tradition. The research is documented in various publications, including a “catalog” of the archaeological and ethnological collections of Costa Rican ceramics at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Dr. Weil’s first AAA annual meeting was in 1971 in NYC as a beginning graduate student.