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Alicia DeNicola
Visiting Assistant Professor
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Department of Anthropology
Union College
Schenectady NY

denicola@union.edu

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FOR CURRENT STUDENTS

Economic Anthropology

Gender Issues

All photographs and text copyright ©2004 Alicia DeNicola
Site design by nacre sky

Overview

I am a social anthropologist specializing in the interconnections between work and the environment as a way to study how people understand themselves and their places in society. My field research focuses on independent textile printing communities in North India and US logging communities in the Pacific Northwest where discourses of tradition and nationhood are politically intertwined with land use, local decision-making power, and livelihoods.

My most recent project, in collaboration with three students at Willamette University, focused on displaced logging communities in the Pacific Northwest. Based on interviews with families and individuals from the Willamette Valley to the Coast, we explored what has happened to the logging community in the past decade, since the contentious debates that juxtaposed environmental movements with jobs and logging. Based on these rich student interviews, we produced a 15-minute video, which has been shown in several classes and was the focus of a Willamette University Forest Futures Roundtable in Spring of 2005. Work from these and other interviews is currently being expanded into a journal article entitled, Deep Roots, Fertile Soil: Memory and the Environment in Pacific Northwest Logging Communities.

I also do research in Bagru, India (Rajasthan) where I work with hand-block textile printers and study the local practices and global politics surrounding this traditional craft. I am currently completing a book manuscript called Printing Borders about the ways that craft traditions and global textile markets influence newly reflexive middle classes and are put into productive use in the framing of India as a newly emerging economic power.

While the landscapes of the Pacific rainforest and the Indian desert are as visibly and culturally different as they can be, there are also many similarities in the way that people work in and relate to the environment around them. Future work in India will focus on a local riverbed and combines my interest in the environment with the politics of independent textile businesses and government regulation. The printing center where I lived sits on the edge of the Thar Desert, and textile printing relies heavily on the environment – in particular the mineral quality of the water used to wash textiles in a land often ravaged by drought. In this context, the muddy river that runs through Bagru becomes an important site of social identity and political control.