Dr. Janet Chernela

Kayapo Field Course Announcement for Summer 2008 !

Readings for ANTH 468 D

Janet Chernela received her PhD from Columbia University in 1983. She has taught in the graduate faculty of Florida International University, and as Adjunt Professor at Columbia University and Georgetown University. In addition, she served as Assistant to the Curator of South American Ethnology of the American Museum of Natural History in the preparation of a permanent hall on South American Indians and as Research Professor at INPA, the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Brazil. She joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in 2003.

Dr. Chernela has conducted fieldwork among indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon for over twenty-five years and is author of the book, The Wanano Indians of the Brazilian Amazon: A Sense of Space as well as sixty articles on issues of indigenous peoples, conservation policy, gender, and language. Recent publications by Chernela discuss a grassroots community development project among riverine peoples at Silves, in the central Brazilian Amazon, a site to which Dr. Chernela has also led an overseas study program.

Chernela has served as a consultant to NGOs, including Cultural Survival, the Nature Conservancy, Ford Foundation, and the Coolidge Center for Environmental Leadership. Projects she proposed for international conservation NGOs include a restoration plan for lands devastated by gold mining in the Yanomami regions of Brazil; a resource management and tourism plan for seven indigenous groups on the Venezuela-Brazil border; and a study abroad program among the Kayapo Indians of Brazil. With indigenous women living in the urban center, Manaus, Brazil, Chernela was founder of AMARN, the Association for Women of the Upper Rio Negro, the first Amerindian women's association in Brazil and its longest-lived Brazilian indigenous organization.

Dr. Chernela serves as Chair of the Committee for Human Rights of the American Anthropological Association (AAA); member of the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association, and is President-elect of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America. She is former member of the AAA Task Force to look into allegations regarding research activities among the Yanomami of Venezuela and Brazil and was appointed to the Association's newly formed Commission on Indigenous People. She is on the editorial boards of the journals Hemisphere and the Journal for Latin American Anthropology.

Dr. Chernela was Chair for the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America.

Go to the SALSA-Tipiti website

See pictures and the program from the 2007 SALSA meeting

Here is a searchable copy of Dr. Chernela's CV.
Follow this link for a For a PDF version.