The Anthropology of the American Southwest (and the Future of the World)

Cordell Lecture

Severin Fowles

Date: November 12, 2026
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Venue: New Mexico Military Museum
This event will also be streamed on YouTube Live - no registration required.

As we continue to awaken to a global ecological crisis that seems to be spiraling out of control, many are looking to the knowledge and perspectives of Indigenous communities for solutions. The hope is that if Western understandings of land as a resource to be exploited created the mess we are in, perhaps non-Western understandings of “kinship with the world”—as Vine Deloria, Jr. put it—might get us out. For more than a century, the anthropology of New Mexico and Arizona has generated some of the most influential ethnographic and archaeological accounts of what it means to live in an Indigenous society, accounts that continue to inspire both scholarly and popular reflection. In this talk, Severin Fowles looks back on this legacy but also ahead to the role Southwest anthropology might play in our uncertain future. In doing so, Fowles centers the lessons to be learned from the land-based traditions of rural Hispano communities in the region, whose indigeneity is neither pure nor primordial but rather the product of more than three centuries of cultural mixing and historical struggle..

Bio: Severin Fowles is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University and a part-time resident of San Antonio del Embudo (Dixon), just north of Santa Fe. He has directed archaeological research in northern New Mexico for three decades in collaboration with Pueblo, Comanche, Hispano, and Anglo communities at sites ranging from precolonial pueblos and agricultural landscapes to colonial-era villages and tipi encampments—along with a brief excursion into the archaeology of Hippie communes from the 1960s. He is the author of An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion (SAR Press), co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Southwest Archaeology (Oxford), and co-editor of the forthcoming volume Writing Southwest Archaeology: Historical Method and Indigenous Representation (SAR Press).