Author of “Singing for the Dead: the Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico“. Currently writing a book about the rise of global interest in the psychedelic plant Salvia divinorum and what it tells us about the world we live in.

I am a linguistic anthropologist whose research interests include language and politics, indigenous literary and social movements, the interface between music and language, the ethnohistory of New World colonization, and the global marketing of indigenous rights discourses, indigenous knowledge, and plants. I conduct most of my research in the Sierra Mazateca in Northern Oaxaca, Mexico.

As a poet, I have published several artists books with artist Laura Richens, including “The Seven Dreams of the Blacksmith“, “Empty Shelf“, and “Sketches“. I have also published my poetry in Voice Literary Supplement of The Village Voice, in Southern Poetry Review, Carolina Quarterly, Massachussetts Review and Sonora Review.

I got my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and came to Brown University following a Harper-Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. At Brown, I am affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Native American and Indigenous Studies, the Program in Science and Technology Studies, and Development Studies.

I teach courses on language and society, social movements in Latin America, language and politics, language and music, and the anthropology of drugs.