Elizabeth Emma Ferry
Brown 220
Department of Anthropology
Brandeis University
P.O. Box 549110, MS 006
Waltham, MA 02454-9110
ferry@brandeis.edu
(781) 736-2218
AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION
Economic anthropology. Political anthropology. Mexico.
Background and Description
Elizabeth Emma Ferry is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in Latin American political economy from an ethnographic perspective, with particular emphasis on Mexico. She received her B.A. from Columbia University in 1990 and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2001. She has held residential fellowships at the University of Michigan Department of Anthropology and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California at San Diego and has taught at Queens College-CUNY and Mary Washington College. Dr. Ferry has conducted research in Guanajuato, Mexico since 1995, with an extended research period from 1996-1998. Her research focuses on relations of power and distribution of resources in a silver mining cooperative. She demonstrates the potency of a polyvalent idiom of “patrimonio” (patrimony) among cooperative members and their families and places this idiom in the context of Mexican political and economic life and the anthropological literature on value. She is currently finishing a book manuscript on this topic entitled: Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico (Columbia University Press, forthcoming). Dr. Ferry has recent and forthcoming articles in the journals Regiones, Cultural Anthropology, Journal of Historical Sociology, and Research in Economic Anthropology, as well as a co-edited volume entitled The Social Relations of Mexican Commodities: Power, Production and Place. At Brandeis, she is a participant in the Working Group on Economic Anthropology and the Study Group for Symbolic Forms. She teaches courses in “Production, Consumption, and Exchange,” “Power and Violence,” “Approaches to Development,” “Latin America in Ethnographic Perspective,” “Anthropological Inquiry,” and “Feast and Famine: Food and Social Relations.” Dr. Ferry is currently working on an historical ethnography of mineral specimen collecting in Latin America, the United States and England. She is married to David Carrico Wood and has two sons, Sebastian and Isaiah.