My specialization is in social anthropology of Latin America, particularly the Andes, and Europe. I have engaged in fieldwork in Bolivia and Ecuador, Spain, Switzerland, and eastern Germany.

The major theme that runs through my research and publications is the manner in which individuals and families adapt to major social, political and economic transformations. In Bolivia, my research has concentrated on the effects of land reform and rural-urban migration on family, kinship, politics, and ritual; artisans and small-scale enterprises in the city of La Paz; and, most lately, post-secondary education and the awakening of Aymara Indian identity. In Spain and Switzerland I focused on short-term and long-term labor migrations from various communities in Spanish Galicia to cities in Switzerland as well as on the massive economic and social changes associated with Spanish democratization and involvement in the European Unions. Finally, in eastern Germany (former German Democratic Republic) I studied privatization and emerging urban and rural entrepreneurship after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I employ methods that reflect an effort to connect the differing lives of individuals to wider regional, national and international contexts and trends. These methods include the gathering of individual and family histories and data on social networks over long periods of time, the subject of one of my seminars.