Office of Ethos Editor

Janet Dixon Keller is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned a PhD in Anthropology through the Language Behavior Research Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research, drawing on fieldwork in the South Pacific and among artist-blacksmiths of the United States, investigates relations between culture and mind from several vantage points:language acquisition, verbal and visual knowledge in everyday practices, semantic and symbolic properties of meaning, and uses of traditional narrative for contemporary interests. Publications include two co-edited volumes of the American Ethnologist (1981-82) on Symbolism and Cognition, an edited collection published by the University of California Press (1985) entitled Directions in Cognitive Anthropology, a co-authored book on Cognition and Tool Use among contemporary Artist-Blacksmiths (Cambridge, 1996), and a co-authored volume of traditional South Pacific narratives in contemporary contexts (with Takaronga Kuautonga Crawford House in press).

Timothy R. Landry is a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation research focuses on the complex relationships between traditional religion in Bénin, West Africa and tourism.  He explores the ways Fon and Yoruba peoples in southern Bénin maintain and sometimes strengthen their involvement with local religious practices (e.g. Vodun) while also negotiating their roles as “cultural brokers” to international tourists.  Indeed, since Bénin’s move from a Marxist-Leninist government to a democratic government in the early 1990s tourists have started traveling to Bénin in significant numbers to explore their personal histories vis-à-vis “roots tourism,” or to experience what they imagine “authentic Vodun” to be. As globalizing agents in Bénin “market” and “sell” cultural heritage internatinoally Tim examines the ways traditional religion in Bénin – most notably Vodun – maintains subjective and cultural relevance in the local imagination.