By Andrea Estrada

Mary Hancock

Casey Walsh

Gregory Wilson

Three UC Santa Barbara anthropologists have published new books, each of which examines some aspect of how political and economic changes impact identity and culture.

In “The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai” (Indiana University Press, 2008), Mary Hancock, a professor of anthropology and of history, explores the spaces of public memory in the southern Indian city of Chennai, a former colonial port now poised to become a center for India’s new economy of information technology, export processing, and back-office services. She grapples with the questions of how people in Chennai remember and represent their history, and with the political and economic contexts and implications of those memory practices.

Casey Walsh, an assistant professor of anthropology, investigates the vital role cotton played in the development of northern Mexico in his book “Building the Borderlands: A Transnational History of Irrigated Cotton Along the Mexico-Texas Border” (Texas A&M University, 2008).

Drawing on previously unexplored archival sources and oral histories, Walsh sheds light on the relations among the different ethnic and class groups involved in cotton production in the borderlands, including Mexican Americans repatriated from Texas. He reveals the short- and long-term environmental impacts of economic development in this region.

Describing the complex relationships among these groups, Walsh shows the mutual influences between capitalist economic ventures and government institutions in both Mexico and the United States. His study links economic and environmental processes by illuminating the development and shape of transnational economic forces in the two countries.

Archaeologists have long puzzled over the massive platform mounds created between 1000 and 1500 A.D. in the midwestern and southeastern United States, and speculated about the ceremonial purposes these mounds may have fulfilled. In his book “The Archaeology of Everyday Life at Early Moundville” (University of Alabama Press, 2008), Gregory Wilson, an assistant professor of anthropology, offers a new account of this important period, based on the archaeology of everyday life in these mound-building societies.

Investigation of the household remains found on these sites reveals that the Moundville community consisted of numerous spatially discrete multi-household groups, similar to those of 17th- and early 18th-century Native American communities in the southeastern United States.