What is this site for? Just stuff I am working on that I want to share with folks. 

Here's a Bio Sketch:

I'm a visiting fellow at the U of SC Dept. of International Business where I was an associate professor for a while. 

These days, I research, consult and write grants on Southern High Plains village development & ranching practices. I'm on the board of the Folsom Museum in Folsom, New Mexico. My work, and daily life, are focused on the environment, people and critters of the Hi Low country of Northeast New Mexico. I've written just a little about it, and will write more. That is, after I get a roof over this house that I'm building (thanks to kindly neighbors who know how to run big front-end loaders to do the dirt-work, my hubby Benson who lets me follow this cowboy dream, and my aijado, J. E. Diaz, who has forgotten more about roofing and tile work than I'll ever know). 

I have an earned doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Kansas, where I studied the beefpacking towns on the High Plains (thanks to Professor Donald D. Stull, the best writer and most fearless—not heartless—editor, ever). I conducted ethnographic work in packinghouses, studying the nature of work and community life in Garden City, Kansas, and elsewhere. My colleagues published more than I did, but there are chapters, here and there, about that sort of work.  With Dr. Donald D. Stull, I co-wrote a little book called Doing Team Ethnography: Warnings and Advice. It was fun to write, and evidently someone is using it in a University, somewhere, as it's still in print. 

Before the South Carolina gig, I was, for fifteen years, helming a team of ethnographers who conducted international studies of how customers and consumers buy and use every-day products.  We traveled a lot, and learned a lot, especially in China and the United States. Our team worked on international design research projects for The Boeing Company (they let us write that one up), a huge chip manufacturer that I'm not supposed to name, Dell, Microsoft, and Epson. I won't work for Dell again: they still owe our moribund little shop some money. I'd work with Hallmark Cards or Epson again in a heartbeat: good people there.(Hallmarkers are fun to work with and they always pay on time; Denise Offitt at Epson is an unstoppable engine of smarts and compassion in a huge multinational, and a dear friend).  I've written about how doing work for big-ass companies is interesting and disappointing—quelle surprise.  (Spoiler alert: that one is about design research to understand the air travel experience of disabled people for Boeing, whose leadership seemed at the time to have no shits to give about the issues, though their design team sure did).  And, I provided direct testimony, one time, to the Postal Rate Commission, which helped them consider more than monetary value in their rate-making decisions. Sure, it was a greeting-card trade group that paid for it, but it was fun to see cultural value become an official part of policy-making.

I'm bilingual in Spanish and English, and conversational in Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Swedish and Portuguese. I can make myself misunderstood in New Mexican Spanish. 

I can't rope off a horse.  Yet.