Cameron M. Curtin

I do fieldwork in Zapotec communities of the mountainous Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Oaxaca is a highly indigenous, culturally diverse state in southern Mexico, home to 16 main ethnolinguistic groups speaking over 100 distinct languages. Many town-level microcultures thrive in the state, making Oaxaca a unique natural laboratory for studying the relationships between culture, psychology, and behavior.

In the village where I primarily work, residents rely on slash-and-burn agriculture to cultivate small, hillside plots. The main crops are intercropped corn, beans, and squash (milpa), coffee, and bunching onions. Households supplement their subsistence agriculture with purchases from small local stores and regional markets, where many villagers also sell their produce. Many migrate away to work for some years (mostly in Los Angeles, CA), and some do wage labor locally.

Social life in the community is structured by a rich set of institutions, including traditional political institutions (usos y costumbres), a mutual aid institution (gozona), a ritual kinship institution (compadrazgo), and religion (Catholicism and Pentecostal Evangelicalism).