Cynthia Abbott Cone
Introduction • Research Interests • Courses • Recommendations
Introduction
Landscape has become the focus of my work in anthropology (and my life). How do people shape their experience of the world around them? How do they interpret their relationships to other human beings, to other forms of life, to the rocks, the soil, water, the sky the cosmos? What are their images of self, of spirit? How do these affect their conception of the nature of good, both moral and aesthetic?
These questions may seem abstract, if not ethereal, but in my research in anthropology and in my teaching, I have found they have very practical plications. Over the course of some forty years in which I have been practicing anthropology I have worked with the Eastern Dakota and Ojibwe Indians of Minnesota, that Tarascan and Highland Maya of Mexico. I have also been involved in several long term applied projects, nearly all focused directly on landscape: the collection of native resources by Leech Lake tribal members as both a means of subsistence and the spiritual maintenance of the cycle of life; the Community Supported Agriculture movement goal of connecting consumers with farmers, urban dwellers with the soil; an inner city children’s garden which builds young children’s sense of self worth as they learn how to grow their food.
Hamline students made great contributions to these research projects, collecting data, analyzing it, and for many, presenting the results at conferences and publications. That’s my segue into teaching! Working with students in my classes, regardless of the content of the course, I try to recreate in various ways the challenges and rewards I find in doing field work, both the emotional and intellectual experience of discovery, of unfolding understanding.
In one course this may entail collaborating with someone on an account of their life’s history, in another it may be coming aware of the limited resources of a Mayan farm family-how their poverty has been shaped by colonial history and global economic–and recognizing the wisdom of their multiple strategies for coping; in third it may be experiencing, through playing West African polyrythmic music, the ways that aesthetic activities can shape moral principles. I try to shape my courses so there is always a discovery process for me as well as for my students and in ways that inspire creativity, often with a spirit of fun. (What are your powers of observation? Blindfolded can you identify your potato in a assemblage of twenty?)
I guess my strategies have worked, for I was very pleased and quite astonished to receive the Distinguished Teaching award from the National Association of Student Anthropologists in 1994. And when I am not teaching anthropology or doing research? My husband, Frank Miller-also an anthropologist-and I have six children and five grandchildren. We all love to travel, and in various combinations have been across both the Pacific and Atlantic several times. We have in-laws in Colombia and Kenya to visit. Canoeing, backpacking and hiking are a passion we have pursued on four continents, but first and foremost in the forests and lakes of northern Minnesota and southern Ontario. On our annual canoe trip last year I realized that my first wilderness canoe trip had been fifty years ago. I am counting on another twenty!
Research Interests
Courses
1160: Introduction to Anthropology
Recommendations
