Meet the Faculty

David Delgado Shorter

• Assistant Professor, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
• Adjunct Faculty, Department of Anthropology, Department of Religious Studies, Program in American Studies
• Affiliated Faculty, Center Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Minority Languages and Cultures, American Indian Studies Research Institute

Education

• Ph.D., History of Consciousness Department, UC Santa Cruz, 2002
• M.A., Religious Studies, Arizona State University, 1996
• B.A., Religious Studies, Arizona State University, 1993

Contact Information

Background

• Indigenous Cinema, Book Series Co-Editor
• National Science Foundation Grant Recipient, 2005
• Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, 2002-2004

Both my personal history and professional training have brought me continuously back to the question of what gets to count as truth.  What histories support which systems of validation that make certain stories histories and others myths?  How do people narrate, perform and express their understandings of the world in ways that counter authorized narratives?  Primarily, I explore these questions in the field of Native Studies that I construct through the combination of anthropology, folklore, and religious studies. 

My classes reflect these interests since they build from and contribute to transdiciplinary methods and theories.  In my undergraduate classes I ask students to consider how native people represent themselves and their worldviews in film and video.  I challenge students to critically engage the complex relationship between storyteller and audience when the stories are about aliens, psychics and ghosts.  In a third course, I require my students to reconsider the politics and promise of individual and collective rituals, myths and symbols.

My research also emerges out of the entaglement between cross-cultural epistemology, ontology, and axiology.  In other words, how do we reconcile one shared world when we as communities (nations, tribes, etc.) produce knowledge differently, consider beings differently, and therefore value differently?  Pursuing answers to these questions requires close attention to the colonialisms, imperialisms, and globalizing processes that permeate the intersubjective relationships between researchers and the researched.  Additionally, to understand how various people make sense of the world and express their sensibilities, my research examines how people (particularly native people) document and record through non-literate performances such as dance, speech, and ritual. I hope my scholarship exemplifies the detailed ethnographic concern that speaks to these issues across both the Humanities and the Social Sciences.

Research Interests

• Anthropology of Ritual
• Indigenous Worldview
• Ethnohistory
• Digital Modes of Representation

Courses Recently Taught

• Aliens, Psychics, Ghosts
• Native American Film and Video
• Myth, Symbol, Ritual
• Ethnography of/as Colonialism
• Indigenous Religions

Publication Highlights

Books and Digital Publications

Holy Dividing Lines: Re-Writing Yoeme (Yaqui) Ethnography. University of Nebraska Press, Under Contract.

Vachiam Eecha/Planting the Seeds: Yoeme Culture and Language. Web-based publication, permanently hosted by New York University. http://www.hemisphericinstitute.org/eng/cuaderno.shtml

Articles

"Hunting for History in Potam Pueblo: A Yoeme (Yaqui) Indian Deer Dancing Epistemology."  Folklore (in print for Fall 2007).

"By and For Natives: The Films of Choctaw Filmmaker, Phil Lucas." World Order, 35/1 (Spring 2004): 77-89.

"Yoeme (Yaqui) Ritual."  In The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. Bron Taylor, Editor and Chief.  Bristol, England (2004): Thoemmes Continuum: 1780-1782.

"Binary Thinking and the Study of Yoeme Indian ‘Lutu’uria/Truth.’" Anthropological Forum, 13/2 (November 2003): 195-203.

"Defining the Canon: A Response to Arnal and Gill’s 'Approaches to the Study of Religion.'"  Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 11/4 (December 1999): 401-407.