Polly Wiessner
University of Utah
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Primary Section: 51, Anthropology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2014)
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Biosketch
Polly Wiessner is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah who has conducted long-term fieldwork among Kalahari Bushman foragers of Southern Africa and Enga highland horticulturalists of Papua New Guinea. She is recognized for her work social networks to reduce risk in the Kalahari and studies of style and social information in material culture. In Papua New Guinea she has carried ethnohistorical studies among the Enga of highland New Guinea, tracing developments in warfare, ritual, and exchange that occurred from the time from the introduction of the sweet potato some 300 years ago until present. Wiessner was born in Vermont where she grew up. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1969 with a degree in creative writing and completed her PhD. in Anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1977. She taught at the University of Aarhus, Denmark from 1977 to 1980 and was a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Human Ethology in Germany from 1981-1996. She joined the Faculty at the University of Utah in 1998.
Research Interests
Wiessner began her research the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of the Kalahari on the question how foragers construct far-flung social security to reduce risk in a harsh desert environment. She is following risk reduction strategies as the Bushmen change from a hunting and gathering lifestyle to a mixed economy in this rapidly changing world. She has conducted ethnoarchaeological studies on social information contained in artifacts and how and why styles change though time. Currently she is addressing the question of what happened to human sociality as firelight altered circadian rhythms and extended the day with economically unproductive, but socially productive hours. Wiessner’s second field site is among the Enga of Papua New Guinea where she has conducted 30 years of ethnohistorical and research on exchange, ritual and warfare. She is currently following changes in Enga warfare after the replacement of bows and arrows with high-powered weapons and studying how customary law courts are updating ‘custom’ to address the issues accompanying rapid change. In Enga, she has built the Tradition and Transition Centre to keep the knowledge of cultural heritage alive and is currently writing curriculum materials to get culture into the Enga school system.
