Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Christian Espinosa Schatz "The Transnationalization of Mayan Agriculture"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

Meetings are Fridays, 11am -1pm Eastern Time.

Meetings will be held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101.

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Christian Espinosa Schatz is a Ph.D. candidate in the combined program in Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Yale. His research engages with the fields of environmental anthropology, human geography, agroecology, ethnobotany, and science and technology studies to understand how climatic change intersects with the local environmental relations of marginalized peoples. His dissertation, based on intensive ethnographic research with a Mam Mayan community in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, examines how U.S.-bound migration is transforming Mayan land-use practices and how, in turn, Mayans make sense of climate through their changing agricultural landscape. Before coming to Yale, Christian received an M.Phil. in Human Geography from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard University, where he was a first-generation college student.