JEAN JACKSON
Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow
Professor of Anthropology

Jean E. Jackson received her B.A. from Wellesley College in Sociology/Anthropology in 1965, and her M.A. (1966) and Ph.D. (1972) from Stanford University . She began teaching at MIT in the fall of 1972. She carried out fieldwork in Mexico, Guatemala and, from 1968 to present, in Colombia, mostly in the Vaupés region in southeastern Colombia, also known as the Central Northwest Amazon. Her earlier Latin American research interests included small-scale societies, kinship and marriage, gender, and anthropological linguistics; she published The Fish People: Linguistic Exogamy and Tukanoan Identity in Northwest Amazonia in 1983 (Cambridge) . During the past 20 years she has examined indigenous mobilizing in Colombia. In 2002 she and co-editor Kay B. Warren published Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation and the State in Latin America . They also co-authored “Indigenous movements in Latin America, 1992-2004: Controversies, ironies, new directions” (2005 Annual Review of Anthropology ). Most recently she and María Clemencia Ramírez co-authored “Traditional, transnational and cosmopolitan: The Colombian Yanacona look to the past and to the future”: 2009, American Ethnologist 36(3): 521-544.

She has also published various pieces on the Colombian conflict. “Colombia's indigenous peoples confront the armed conflict” came out in 2005 (in Cristina Rojas, Judy Meltzer, eds., Elusive Peace: International, National, and Local Dimensions of Conflict in Colombia ), as well as “Update on the Colombian Crisis” for the American Anthropological Association Committee for Human Rights (2005).

Another research area is medical anthropology. In 1986 she conducted ethnographic research in an inpatient chronic pain center in New England . Seven book chapters and articles on this research have been published, as well as “ Camp Pain ”: Conversations with Chronic Pain Patients (2000, Pennsylvania ). In September 2006 she gave a paper on “‘Extreme Behaviors' Resulting from Integrated Body/Mind Disciplines: The Cross-Cultural Evidence,” at a conference on Longevity and Optimal Health. It appeared in a special issue on “Longevity, Regeneration, and Optimal Health” of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2009, Vol. 1172: 270-277). “Bodies and Pain,” in Frances Mascia-Lees, ed., A Companion to the Anthropology of Bodies/Embodiment , was published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2011.

She is currently conducting archival research on how Colombia's indigenous communities have been represented in the country's two national newspapers, 1988-present, and is working on a book, The Colombian Indigenous Movement and the Multicultural Neoliberal State, 1990-2010 .