George A. Collier : An Oral History
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- George Collier, Professor Emeritus in the Stanford Department of Anthropology, provides an overview of his family background and education and shares highlights from his research in Chiapas, Mexico and Los Olivos, Spain; his faculty and teaching career at Stanford; and his departmental and university service. Collier describes his experience as a researcher on the Harvard Chiapas Project with Evon Vogt and offers details of his many research collaborations, including his work with Jane Fishburne Collier. Recalling his service as director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford in the 1980s, Collier speaks about the atmosphere of intellectual exchange fostered at Bolivar House, the Center’s relationship with UC Berkeley, and its funding imperatives. He also offers reflections on chairing the Department of Anthropology and its various tensions and intellectual currents. Additional topics include serving on the Committee on Academic Freedom in the early 1970s, developing “The World Outside the West” course at a time when western culture requirements were changing; the use of aerial photography, mapping, and household surveys in anthropological research; and the work of Gary Schoolnik and the Geographical Medicine Group. An addendum to the interview provides information on his father Charles Wood Collier’s friendship with Georgia O’Keefe and the family’s time at Los Luceros in New Mexico.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Extent | 1 text file |
| Place | Stanford (Calif.) |
| Publisher | Stanford Historical Society |
| Date created | May 11, 2021 - 2021-06-08 |
| Language | English |
| Digital origin | born digital |
Creators/Contributors
| Interviewee | Collier, George A. (George Allen), 1942- | |
|---|---|---|
| Creator | Collier, George A. (George Allen), 1942- | |
| Interviewer | Abel, Suzanne | |
| Publisher | Stanford Historical Society |
Subjects
| Subject | Collier, George A. (George Allen), 1942- |
|---|---|
| Subject | Stanford University. Department of Anthropology |
| Subject | Harvard Chiapas Project |
| Subject | Stanford University. Center for Latin American Studies |
| Genre | Interview |
Bibliographic information
| Biographical Profile | George Allen Collier, an anthropologist, is a scholar of agrarian change and politics in southern Mexico and western Andalusia, who has contributed to understanding of the macro-economic and political forces shaping Indigenous and peasant social movements. He taught about the cultural history of Spain and the Americas at Stanford, becoming Emeritus Professor of Anthropology in 1999. Collier’s Mexican research in the highland Maya communities of Chiapas spanned the ebb and flow of Mexico’s national policies from 1960 to 2004. In Fields of the Tzotzil: The Ecological Bases of Tradition in Highland Chiapas (1975), Collier documents Indigenous communities’ participation as peasants in the Mexican agrarian reform. He also traces how they negotiated ethnic relations with one another and with Mexican nationals in the face of the country’s Indianist policies. By the 1980s, Mexico’s petroleum-centered development lured Mayan maize (corn) farmers into urban construction, commerce, and trucking, making them more vulnerable to macro-economic booms and busts. The country’s 1982 crisis of external debt rippled back into agrarian unrest and political conflict, especially after Mexico slashed its social budget as part of an international bailout to restructure the debt and began to curtail agrarian programs. In Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas (1994, 1999, 2004) Collier delineates how the Maya, frustrated both as peasants and as Indians by divisive national policies and corrupt elections, took up arms in rebellion in January 1994, bringing international attention to their demands for indigenous rights and autonomy. In Andalusia’s western province of Huelva, Collier and his wife, Jane Fishburne Collier, began research in “Los Olivos” in 1963, later following villagers as they abandoned small-farming and share cropping for urban-industrial wage work in other parts of Spain. Collier reconstructs the earlier agrarian politics of the town in Socialists of Rural Andalusia: Unacknowledged Revolutionaries of the Second Republic (1987). Los Olivos’s Socialists were more interested in reforming agrarian hiring practices than their party leaders in other parts of Spain, who focused more on land redistribution. Both causes were crushed by the Spanish Civil War and subsequent repression. Collier was born in 1942 in Washington, D.C. to Nina Perera Collier and Charles Wood Collier, both of them involved at the time in Latin American cultural affairs as attachés to the US Embassy in Bolivia. Collier grew up on a dairy farm in northeastern Maryland and graduated in 1959 from the Gilman Country School for Boys in Baltimore, Maryland. Although he was a grandson of John Collier, Sr., Commissioner of Indian Affairs during the New Deal and nephew to anthropologists Donald and Malcolm Collier and John Collier, Jr., he set off to study physics at Harvard with a scholarship from the Armco Steel Corporation (later AK Steel Holding Corp). He decided instead to study anthropology while taking a Freshman Seminar on the Navajo from Clyde Kluckhohn. Collier joined an undergraduate fieldwork program led by Harvard’s Evon Z. Vogt in Chiapas, Mexico to study Mayan culture change. Jane Heyward Fishburne (BA, 1962, Radcliffe College) was another member of the team, and the two married in 1962 while Collier completed his Harvard Anthropology BA (1963). Both received Fulbright awards in 1963 to support their initial research in Spain. Collier earned his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard in 1968. Two children, David John Collier and Lucy Jane Collier, accompanied the couple in research stints in Chiapas, Mexico, while George undertook postdoctoral study at Tulane University’s Middle American Research Institute and Jane completed her doctoral study at Tulane’s Anthropology department. Stanford University invited Collier to join the Anthropology faculty in 1969. His wife joined the same department in 1972. Collier directed Stanford’s Center for Latin American Studies from 1983 to 1989 and served from 1990 to 1994 as Chair of the Anthropology department. During his Stanford years, Collier thought and taught about Ibero-American culture history and especially about the place of ethnic communities within imperial and colonial systems and under capitalism. He co-edited The Inca and Aztec States, 1400-1800: Anthropology and History (1982). With colleagues in Stanford’s History department, he taught The World Outside the West, examining the relationship of Europe to Latin America, Africa, and East Asia. He also taught Encounters for Stanford’s Culture, Ideas and Values (CIV) program, studying the relation of Europe to the Americas in the 16th century and after the rise of industrial capitalism. Collier had a bent for methodology. He taught computer applications and statistics for anthropology and methods for anthropological fieldwork. He developed the KINPROGRAM to process genealogical censuses in the computer. He used computer-based mapping and geographical information systems as research tools and helped develop a highly successful proposal writing course for graduate students seeking funding for their doctoral research. Collier collaborated with colleagues in Barcelona and Madrid and with researchers in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. Collier received awards in support of his scholarship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Science Foundation. After retirement, the Professors Collier joined the Swans Market Cohousing community in Oakland, California. They served as treasurer and membership officers for the Mycological Society of San Francisco. They took up wilderness restoration with the Sierra Club and Friends of Nevada Wilderness as well as cultural heritage work for the U.S. Forest Service’s Passport-in-Time program. They volunteered for the Alameda County Food Bank and in programs to help grade-school students advance to college. They now live in Oakland’s St. Paul’s Towers and still hike regularly in the Oakland hills. |
|---|---|
| Summary Part 1 | Part 1 [00:00:00-00:33:11] Family history and parents Charles Wood Collier and Nina Perera Collier • Time in Bolivia as a child • Indian Springs Farm in Maryland; father’s work with aerial photography • Early education in Maryland • Family ties to anthropology; early interest in math and science • Undergraduate education at Harvard; Harvard Chiapas Project with Evon Vogt • Five Cultures Project; Clyde Kluckhohn and Evon Vogt [00:33:12-01:00:42] Overview of Vogt’s work in Chiapas • Collier’s undergraduate thesis on Tzotzil color categories • Computer programming course with Arthur Couch; development of KINPROGRAM to study ecological and social trends • Training in photo interpretation by ITEK Corporation; research in Apas using photos; census of individual households in Apas • Serving as assistant field director for Vogt handling undergraduate research assignments • Marriage to Jane Fishburne Collier • Research assistant work studying values through folktales and myths with Benjamin Nicholas Colby [01:00:43-01:31:55] Fulbright scholarship research in Los Olivos, Spain • Childcare in the field; relationship with housekeeper and her family • Study of courtship and marriage in Los Olivos by Richard Price and Sally Price • Research in Los Olivos by Michelle Zimbalist and Sally Simons • Reflections on collaborative research • Experience living in Spain under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship [01:31:56-02:02:15] Tracing the disappearance of Socialists during Franco’s reign • US presence in Spain in 1960s and 1970s • Continuity of research in Los Olivos and Chiapas • Graduate school at Harvard • Jane’s graduate work at Tulane • Memories of Evon Vogt and other mentors and colleagues [02:02:16-02:18:39] Managing family and academic life • Post doctorate research at Tulane University; collegiality of anthropology faculty at Tulane • Reflections on 1969 in Chiapas and at Stanford |
| Summary Part 2 | Part 2 [00:00:00-00:38:01] Decision to join faculty of Stanford Department of Anthropology • Faculty housing perks; Frenchman’s Lane • Stanford Department of Anthropology in late 1960s/early 1970s • Stanford during the Vietnam War era • Benjamin Paul’s departmental leadership • Women faculty and faculty of color in Department of Anthropology [00:38:02-01:00:20] Courses taught in his first two years • Freshman seminars • Freshman writing requirement; creating a proposal writing course with Jane Collier • Seminar in Chiapas on the Maya • Committee on Academic Freedom in the wake of the firing of Bruce Franklin; experience of Collier’s parents during McCarthy era [01:00:21-01:39:50] Diversifying graduate students in Anthropology • Hiring Sylvia Yanagisako • Guggenheim Fellowship; researching representations of Indigenous people from the colonial period; slide library • Paper on Aboriginal Sin in the Garden of Eden • The World Outside the West course; Western civ debates; development of CIV track [01:39:51-02:07:26] Serving as director of the Center for Latin American Studies; Bolivar House • Joint Latin American Studies program with Berkeley • Intellectual exchange at Center for Latin American Studies, including Tinker Foundation scholars • Latin American Studies funding and summer fellowship [02:07:27-02:38:33] Gary Schoolnik and geographical medicine group; Navenchauc census • Serving as chair of the Department of Anthropology; proving value of department’s teaching to the wider university • Sources of graduate student funding, including Mellon Foundation [02:38:34-03:17:27] Reflections on tensions in Stanford Department of Anthropology • Zapatista rebellion and book Basta! • Research in Zinacantán in 1990s, including database and mapping based on Resumen Informativo • Decision to stop research in 2005 • Decision to retire early; departmental tensions |
| Summary Part 3 | Part 3 [00:00:00-00:34:40] Additional comments on early retirement • Reflections on intellectual strengths and currents in Stanford Department of Anthropology • Changing research landscape in Chiapas • Graduate students and colleagues, including Liliana Suárez, Bill Maurer, and Susan Coutin [00:34:41-01:10:37] UC Irvine Anthropology • Collaboration with Gary McCue • Volunteer work, including with U.S. Forest Service’s Passport in Time program; Kentucky Camp • Colliers’ papers in Stanford University Archives [01:10:38-01:38:57] Reflections on his research contributions, including inspiration from ethnohistorian France Scholes and the intellectual history of the “Aboriginal Sin and the Garden of Eden” paper • Paper “Seeking Food and Seeking Money” on class stratification in Zinacantán • Benefits of diverse research methodologies [01:38:58-02:00:43] Major sources of support for his work • Returning to Los Olivos to speak about their 1960s research there • Loma Prieta earthquake • Nationalist movements in Spain [02:00:44-02:19:50] Change over time in Mexico and Chiapas, including violence and crime • Mexican politics • Future for Indigenous people in Mexico; impact of COVID-19 pandemic • Children David and Lucy • Role of photography in his career |
| Summary Part 4 | Addendum to Interview Family’s relationship to the Southwest, especially Charles Wood Collier’s friendship with Georgia O’Keefe • Los Luceros |
| Audio/Video |
|
| Finding Aid | |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/dh104rq4375 |
| Location | SC0932 |
| Repository | Stanford University. Libraries. Department of Special Collections and University Archives |
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
Collection
Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program interviews, 1999-2022
View other items in this collection in SearchWorksAlso listed in
Loading usage metrics...