Bauer documents changes among Chinantec in rural Mexico

After 23 years of visiting the remote 2,000-person Chinantec Indian village of San Pedro Yolox in the Sierra Juarez Mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, Dan Bauer knows the villagers better than the residents of his own town near campus. Bauer, professor of anthropology and sociology, has watched the changes in the village with the arrival of television and video games and the departure of many young adults risking the dangerous journey across the border to seek work in the U.S.

He has forged personal relationships with many of the villagers, even serving as a godparent to their children, and his trips to Yolox are now like visiting extended family, catching up on who’s married whom, and how the children have grown up. In the late 1970s, when he first visited Yolox, “about 90 percent of the village households farmed land and a third of those raised coffee,” said Bauer. “There had been gun battles among the region’s villages over which would control the best coffee land. Today, only two or three families are still growing coffee” due to the low worldwide price for coffee beans. Now, “about 10 percent of the villagers work in the U.S.,” travelling back and forth between the two countries. “Since most of those leaving are men between the ages of 20 and 40, a large number of households find themselves without the labor needed to farm,” he added.

Yolox’s territory spans both sides of a mountain, from an elevation of 2,400 feet on the arid side up to a peak of nearly 10,000 feet and down the other tropical side to an elevation of 3,000 feet. The difficult terrain had isolated the village until the first road arrived in 1964. So the Yoleños were used to supporting one another in difficult times and working together for the common good of the village. Now there is a great deal of economic inequality in the village as those who work in the U.S. have significantly more money than those who stay behind. Twenty years ago, when a city hall was built, the villagers literally built it with their own hands and labor. All of the residents volunteered to work on the project. Recently, when a new basketball court was built, a hired contractor did most of the work, hiring individuals for cash.

“The range of wealth is staggering,” Bauer says. “You now see marriage outside the village, as those who work in the U.S. marry ‘outsiders’ who speak no Chinantec. Their children don’t speak Chinantec, and the language may soon disappear as it has done in regions closer to the city of Oaxaca. Their mythology is also threatened. Instead of saying someone is acting like ‘a dze riq,’ a Chinantec prankster, they now say he is acting like ‘Homero Simpson.'”

Bauer was studying mechanical engineering in college when he “discovered electives” and decided to broaden his background by studying journalism and liberal arts instead. He began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru teaching English at a university and auto mechanics in a trade school on the shore of Lake Titicaca, about 13,000 feet up in the mountains. He also traveled from village to village installing water pumps in the town wells, and teaching the maintenance skills to local villagers. Returning to the U.S., he pursued a doctorate in social anthropology, spending two years doing research in Ethiopia among the Tigray.

Bauer brings his experiences in rural Mexico and among the peoples of Ethiopia and Peru to his classes on ethnographic methods. The students learn to be trained observers, interviewing subjects and producing videos and written ethnographies documenting their group. This year, student teams are studying the worlds of rodeo communities, extreme sports, an old age home, the Shiloh Baptist church, and the local Sikh community.

For the last 15 years, Bauer has also been the program director of Lafayette’s Technology Clinic, in which teams of students tackle a real problem for businesses or non-profit groups. The clinic has become a capstone experience for students, who must be nominated by a faculty member and selected for a spot on a team.

“I had the opportunity to work extensively with Dan during my time at Lafayette,” says Nicole Herbert ’00, a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, Africa who graduated with a double major in art and anthropology and sociology. “He was my advisor for anthropology and sociology, I did Tech Clinic with him, and completed a one-semester thesis under his guidance as well. Perhaps the most unique aspect of Dan’s instructional methodology can best be described as collaborative. In both Tech Clinic and anthropology courses, I always felt that I was working with Dan, as opposed to for Dan. This atmosphere was receptive to the student’s own creative input as it fostered the development of independently motivated problem-solving skills. On a more personal note, Dan’s hospitality extended beyond the borders of Lafayette’s campus as he and Judy opened the doors of their home to students on multiple occasions.”

Herbert worked on the Tech Clinic team that developed programming recommendations about the 1753 Bachman Tavern, the oldest building in Easton, for the Easton Heritage Alliance. She says she was attracted to the Peace Corps through her anthropology courses, which “provided the impetus to live for an extended period of time in another country. The Peace Corps provided the means.” An agricultural volunteer, Herbert currently lives in a small village of Tougouzefa, which is about 130 kilometers north of Niger’s capital, Niamey. She is learning Zarma, the local language, and acts as a liaison, facilitating relationships between government officials, other development organizations and the local population. She also assists with a program that provides scholarships to young girls to enable them to continue their education beyond the primary school level. Other topics she addresses include AIDS education, anti-desertification methods, and income-generating activities.

“Without a doubt, Prof. Bauer is the one professor who most influenced me, and best prepared me for my career,” says Asela Gunawardana ’95, a researcher in the speech technology group at Microsoft Research. “The year I spent on tech clinic I learned many of the skills that I need on a daily basis in my position as a member of one of the foremost technology research labs in the world.”

Gunawardana earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, with a minor in computer science, and went on to earn a Ph.D. this past May from Johns Hopkins University in electrical and computer engineering. He is currently working to develop new techniques for speech recognition and conducting fundamental research on statistical machine learning, developing ways for computers to learn from examples.

“Prof. Bauer taught his students through hands-on experience that the hardest part of solving a problem is defining it and understanding it; that the most brilliant technical solution is useless unless it addresses the social, political, economic, and human issues surrounding it; and that even if it addresses all of this, it needs to be communicated effectively in order to be adopted,” Gunawardana says. His tech clinic team developed a neural network-based diagnosis tool for sleep apnea, a condition that causes people to stop breathing while they sleep, for the Sleep Disorder Center at Sacred Heart Hospital in Allentown. By entering information about the patient, such as height, weight, and lifestyle, the system would predict the likelihood of the patient having sleep apnea. Although it wasn’t used clinically, since the process of getting such a system approved for clinical use it too lengthy for a one-year tech clinic project, the system helped healthcare providers show patients how lifestyle changes such as weight loss and cutting down on alcohol and tobacco consumption could help with their apnea.

“Throughout the year, Prof. Bauer was simply one member of the team, never actually telling students what they should or should not do,” Gunawardana says. “Instead, he allowed team members to develop leadership and communication skills and solve problems by themselves, and guided them to information sources when they needed it. Occasionally, he would raise issues that he thought we were ignoring. With much behind the scenes work, he made sure that five tenderfoot college kids with no prior experience ended up doing the job of a professional consulting team, learning how along the way, because they wanted to. There were no assignments and no exams. We simply had a client with a hazy notion that they needed help, and a year to identify and solve their problem.”

“In addition to all of this, I ended up learning about fuzzy logic, a fairly new branch of mathematics developed in the last few decades, and neural networks, a technique for making computers learn from examples as human brains do, as well as a good deal of sociology,” Gunawardana continues. “It’s my introduction to neural networks from someone who is nominally a professor of anthropology that eventually led to my Ph.D. in statistical machine learning and to my eventual position at Microsoft. Even now, six years after Lafayette, he remains a highly valued source of advice and guidance.”

Highlights:

Publications: Household and Society in Ethiopia, Michigan State University, 1986; “The Sacred and the Secret: Order and Chaos in Tigray Medicine and Politics” in William Arens and Ivan Karp Creativity of Power, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989, 225-243; “The Dynamics of Communal and Hereditary Land Tenure Among the Tigray of Ethiopia,” The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resource, Bonnie J. McCay and James M. Acheson, eds., University of Arizona Press, 1987, 217-230. “Ethnographic Methods as Performance” FOSA Newsletter, 1999.
Honors: 1996 Marquis Distinguished Teaching Award, Mellon Research Fellowship 1980-81.
Achievements: program director of Lafayette Technology Clinic, 1986 to present; department head, 1986-98; Peace Corps volunteer in Peru, 1962-64.
Contact: (610) 330-5189; bauerdan@lafayette.edu

In a prior Technology Clinic project, \nDan Bauer, professor of anthropology and sociology, discusses potential hotel renovations with students Jessica Badger and Irshad Haji.