Walter E. Little

Walter E. Little is the author of nine books and edited volumes and has published over 90 articles and reviews. His monograph, Mayas in the Marketplace: Tourism, Globalization, and Cultural Identity (Texas, 2004), won Best Book of 2005 from the New England Council for Latin American Studies and his co-edited volume, Street Economies in the Urban Global South (SAR, 2013) won the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize in 2014.

Dr. Little was raised on a farm near Logansport, Indiana. Upon getting a BA in journalism at Roosevelt University in Chicago in 1987, he spent the following two years working in Central America and traveling over land to Lake Titicaca, after which he returned to Chicago where he earned an MA in anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He completed his PhD in cultural anthropology at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

He is a cultural anthropologist at the University at Albany, SUNY, who studies the socio-economic and political lives of Mesoamericans. His multi-sited ethnographic research in Guatemala and Mexico aims to understand heritage and tourism practices in urban places with attention to identity politics and handicrafts sales to tourists. His research explores Kaqchikel and K'iche' Mayas' livelihoods as artisans and vendors in urban heritage sites, as a way to learn how about socio-economic mobility and the creative ways in which Mayas have made do and, even, thrived in a political system that has long discriminated against them.

For more information about his research, please see his faculty page: http://www.albany.edu/anthro/littlea.php.