Welcome to my website!

I am a cultural anthropologist with “four-field” training in ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and physical anthropology. As a Southeast Asia area specialist, my work focuses on the indigenous peoples of Mindanao in the southern Philippine archipelago. However, I am geared towards comparative research and have always explored my topical interests from a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary perspective, the result of an early fascination with African studies.

My interests include most aspects of basic social organization, including political organization, religion and religious conversion, ethnic identity and differentiation, political discourse, demography, gender, collective violence, ecology, small-scale production and economics, and especially issues related to social stratification and inequality.

My fundamental orientation towards public or "applied" anthropology is reflected in these interests. I value social science research that is actively informed by praxis, and vice versa. I’m proud to say that my graduate research has been referenced over the years by development consultants and NGOs working with indigenous peoples in Mindanao and elsewhere in the Philippines. I'm planning to become more directly involved in humanitarian and development work after my Ph.D.

Beyond my academic training in anthropology, I am also a writer, having worked as a freelance writer and editor, even going public a few times with my poetry. This intimate relationship with the written word brings me great joy, and it is one area in which I am always eager to play and learn.

As for this website, it is part of my lifelong love of visual art and design. Though I never went to art school, I worked for a time as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer, as well as a photographer's assistant. To this day I retain a keen interest in design, very broadly construed to include everything from visual media and branding to architecture and industrial design. As such, I bring this sensibility into everything I do. I offer my old portfolio pieces in this website because they remain important to who I am today.