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xvii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS provider of conferences, books, art, exhibits, and a series of directors who have been generous with their help and expertise My research has been supported over many years by various agencies including the American Council of Learned Societies in conjunction with the Social Science Research Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities for their International and Area Studies Fellowship, Indiana University fellowships and grants-in-aid from the College Arts and Humanities Institute, Media Production Services, New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities, Research and the University Graduate School, and the President’s Council on International Programs. Being a Phi Beta Kappa Couper Scholar in 2006–2007 gave me the opportunity to lecture on the topic of Zapotec death to faculty and students at the University of Houston and California State University at Fullerton. Places where one can simply be quiet and let thoughts flow where they will at their own pace are rare. This project benefited from two such places. The Mount Calvary Monastery and Retreat Center in Santa Barbara, California, lets me find solitude within community supported by the kindness, humor, and generosity of the brothers resident there. Brother Nicholas Radelmiller read the entire manuscript, making excellent observations and comments, especially with regard to liturgical practices. The White Magnolia School of the Plum Blossom Confederation of Tai Chi, under the leadership of Dr. Miriam Marsolais, let me bring mind and body together. It was a class and then a conversation with Miriam that made me think of the river as a metaphor for Zapotec persistence and change. The gifted women of the Five Women Poets—Joyce Adams, Patricia Coleman , Anne Haines, Debora Horning, Deborah Hutchinson, Antonia Matthews, and Leah Helen May—have been my circle of writing colleagues who have read all the many poems inspired by Juchitán and the Juchitecos. On annual returns to Berkeley, I had the opportunity of talking about death in Mesoamerica and the ideas taking shape in this book with wonderful scholars and ethnographers Elizabeth Colson, George Foster, and Laura Nader. Elizabeth Colson read the whole manuscript, and her ability to see the important questions as well as the gaps in an argument have immeasurably improved the book. George Foster and I talked about the indigenous origin of the wet-dry opposition that is so crucial to the Isthmus Zapotec view, and he was most gracious in acknowledging that my argument for it was convincing. Laura Nader spoke from the depth of her own experience with the Zapotec, her perceptive questions forcing me to rethink where the ethnography was leading me. Here in Bloomington, my colleague Raymond J. DeMallie, having read more than one draft, led me back to the evidence more than once. Della Collins Cook joined me in the field for a project on birth seasonality. Her perspective as a bioanthropologist and her expertise on mortuary practices in general have enlarged my vision. All these colleagues are and were the best xviii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS of field ethnographers, appreciating the value of description as the only ground for saying anything of value. Long-term field research is not as common as one might think. I doubt that many of us who do it understood that we would spend lifetimes living and sharing the lives of those whose stories we would tell. Mentors and colleagues become precious models and valued sounding boards as we encounter the peculiar challenges, ethical and ethnographic, of such long engagement. Working with longtime colleague Robert V. Kemper, editing the collection of essays Chronicling Cultures: Long-Term Field Research in Anthropology (2002), provided a unique opportunity to talk about the different shapes these involvements took, to talk about the place of such research within the field as a whole, and to see how individual scholars had crafted their responses to such lifetimes of ethnography. In 2005 I was invited by Dr. Bren Neale, University of Leeds, to present a paper at an international seminar on longitudinal qualitative research where I discovered international colleagues whose work was leading them to address the same questions. Serving now on the international board of Timescapes, a five-year study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of Great Britain, has expanded even further the examples of approaches and findings. I am grateful to Bren Neale for being such a generous and visionary colleague. Friendships with Juchitecos whose work (dxiiña’ ) is essential to the remembrance and celebration of death taught me not just which and how many vocations...

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