ABC's of Affirmative Action

Expanded Bookshelf

	Open Book
	Book Shelf
	Bookmarks

A Faculty Reflection

Opportunities For Giving

Campus Collage

Helping To Make CSU, Chico Better

Carolyn Brown Heinz, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at CSU, Chico since 1990. A socio-cultural anthropologist who specializes in South Asia, her research interests include gender, art, religion, social organization, "new media" approaches in visual anthropology, postmodern, postcolonial theory, and interpretive anthropology. In addition to teaching in anthropology, Heinz is the coordinator of the Asian Studies Program.

She has done extensive field work in Asia, most recently in India to update her research on the ritual art of Maithil Brahman women and to collect slide, video, and sound materials for use in a multimedia CD-ROM ethnography. As a Fulbright Scholar in 1979-80, she studied the social organization of Maithil Brahmans and the political organization of Darbhanga Raj, the largest zamindari estate in British India.

Asian Cultural Traditions is a cultural survey of what Heinz refers to as "monsoon Asia," the geopolitical regions of South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. "My focus is not nationalist, but cultural," she writes in the introduction. "I do not take as given or eternal the nation-states that have emerged in the postcolonial world, enduring as those may prove to be." Drawing from anthropology, history, geography, linguistics, religious studies, art history, world literature, and political science, Heinz examines the diversity of Asian cultures and several "major cultural strands by which people in Asian societies have organized their collective life and made their lives meaningful."

Return to Open Book