Les W. Field is Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of "The Grimace of Macho Ratón: Artisans, Identity," and "Nation in Late-Twentieth-Century Western Nicaragua," also published by Duke University Press, and a co-editor of "Anthropology Put to Work."
Education
Les W. Fiend attended Johns Hopkins University, where he got a Bachelor of Science degree in 1979. In 1987 he became a Doctor of Philosophy at Duke University, with the dissertation: “I am content with my art: Two Groups of Artisans in Revolutionary Nicaragua."
Career
Les Field worked at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire, United States, as a member of anthropology faculty in residence in 1991-1994. Professor Les Field received an appointment in the Department of Anthropology at The University of New Mexico in 1994, where he currently serves as department chair. His areas of focus are Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, Indigenous California, and Palestine, with his main areas of interest and research centering on indigenous identities, narrative and history, nationalist ideologies and the State, resources and development, social transformations and landscapes, and conflict zones. Offering a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses, his classes discuss the theory of ethnology, society, and culture, social violence, human rights, among other topics.
Earlier, he worked as a visiting assistant professor at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States visiting in 1988; a visiting assistant professor of history at San Jose State University, in 1991. He also was as tribal ethnohistorian in the Esselen Nation of Costanoan Indians in 1995 and the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe in 1995.
Field has worked in Colombia for more than 20 years. Initially, he worked in agricultural development, but he has always been riveted by the pre-Columbian heritage of the country. Farmers he worked with were finding artifacts in their fields and had their own interpretation of the past and the meaning of the objects. Field had to leave Colombia for years because of the drug-related violence in the country but was able to return in 2005.
When he returned to the area north of Calí, he learned what had happened in his absence. In the early 1990s a sugar cane worker was plowing a field when he looked back at his work and saw gold artifacts coming out of the ground. Field says within two days, there were thousands of people digging in the field, looking for gold objects. He said it created a social convulsion in that part of the country.
He knew immediately that this was a terrifically important story for a cultural anthropologist to explore. The government had made an effort throughout the 20th century to promote the Museo Del Oro and to encourage Colombians to think of that as their heritage. But the discovery and mass looting of pre-Columbian gold artifacts in a field in the 1990s suggested that those efforts had not necessarily created that sensibility.
Field worked in Colombia from 2007 through 2010 on the project funded by a Fulbright Fellowship. He has written an article "The Gold System: Explorations of the Ongoing Fate of Colombia's pre-Columbian Gold Artifacts" for the Colombian anthropology journal "Antipode" and will submit an updated version of that text to an anthropology journal in the U.S. as well. He is currently working with a number of Colombian anthropologists in his research into the history of the gold find and the way that the country discusses its own history.