Luis Vivanco is a Cultural Anthropologist and Director of the UVM Latin American Studies Program. He holds a B.A. in Religion from Dartmouth College (1991), and M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (1999) degrees in Cultural Anthropology from Princeton University. He came to UVM in 1997 as a New England Board of Higher Education Dissertation Write-up Fellow, and began as Assistant Professor in 1999.

Luis' scholarship focuses on the socio-cultural and political aspects of "saving nature" in Monte Verde, Costa Rica and Oaxaca, Mexico. This ethnographic research explores how meanings of nature and social change are debated, negotiated, imposed, and resisted through environmental and indigenous social movements, ecotourism, and sustainable development. The theoretical focus is on how ideas about nature and its conservation - in areas like science, media, state and non-state bureaucracies, local knowledge - are produced, circulated, and transformed as social groups with divergent interests and knowledge interact and conflict with each other in contexts of rapid environmental degradation and globalization. He has published his work in various journals (American Anthropologist, Ethnology, Alternatives Journal, The Ecologist) and books on democracy and environmentalism; reconstructing conservation; tourism; and religion and cinema. He is currently finishing a book manuscript on his Costa Rica research, tentatively titled Green Encounters: Defining and Reshaping Conservation in Rural Costa Rica. He is also the co-editor of two books: Talking About People: Readings in Contemporary Cultural Anthropology (McGraw-Hill, with Bill Haviland and Rob Gordon) and Tarzan was an Ecotourist…And Other Reflections on the Anthropology of Adventure (with Rob Gordon).

Complementing his academic work, Luis is involved in Indigenous tourism activism, as a board member of Indigenous Tourism Rights International, and as a founding member of Dialogos: A Forum for Intercultural Encounters. Both organizations facilitate dialogues and encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples on themes of cultural regeneration, social and political justice, and democratic solutions to environmental degradation.

He has received a number of prestigious awards to support his ethnographic research, including Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and the New England Board of Higher Education. He has also received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to attend an cultural studies institute at the East-West Center (University of Hawai'i) and a Fullbright Award to teach at the University of Costa Rica.

Luis teaches a variety of courses for the department. In his area of research specialization, he teaches courses on Culture and Global Environmental Problems, Culture and Globalization, Applied and Development Anthropology, and a study abroad course in Oaxaca, Mexico on Indigenous political and environmental activism. He also teaches Ethnographic Research Methods, Anthropological Theory, Latinos in the U.S.,, Race and Ethnicity in the U.S., and Introduction to Human Cultures. He is a member of the Integrated Social Science Program, the John Dewey Honors Program, and the UVM Graduate Faculty.

Visit Luis' web site at http://www.uvm.edu/~lvivanco.