Biographical Memoirs Volume 86 (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Evon Zartman Vogt, Jr.
Evon Zartman Vogt, Jr.
Pages 354-377
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Vogt did so by spending 35 years among the Tzotzil Maya of Zinacantan in Chiapas, Mexico. His enormous dataset led him to generate new insights about how communities change over time while conserving and maintaining many traditions.
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On occasion his Zuni and Navaho neighbors came to visit and were often invited to eat and spend the night. The younger Vogt loved these visits and later described his childhood home and its environs as a "rural microcosm of the United Nations lying within forty miles of the Vogt Ranch." Vogt always said that his father stimulated his interest in other cultures by taking him (1)
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to the less acculturated Navaho living in the Canyon de Chelly; and (3) to a performance of the Hopi Snake Dance at Walpi, where the snake priests danced with live rattlesnakes in their mouths.
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and Bandelier National Monument near Santa Fe. On September 4, 1941, Vogt married fellow student Catherine Christine Hitler ("Nan" to her friends)
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THE HARVARD YEARS While writing his dissertation on the Navaho, Vogt applied to the newly established Department of Social Relations at Harvard, where he was offered an instructorship. In December 1948 he finished his dissertation, Navaho Veterans: A Study of Acculturation (published in 1951 as Navaho Veterans: A Study of Changing Values)
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codirected the Ramah Project, whose formal title was "The Comparative Study of Values in Five Cultures." Vogtie's interest in comparative studies was inspired by his professor, Fred Eggan, well known for his "method of controlled comparison." In 1955 Vogt published Modern Homesteaders: Life in a Twentieth Century Frontier Community, and in 1966 (with Ethel M Albert)
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Vogt pursued this interest further than most ethnologists; he envisioned tracing the contemporary Maya from their prehistoric protoculture and protolanguage by means of a framework he eventually called the "phylogenetic model" (see below)
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He even brought Zinacanteco informants up to spend six weeks or more in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so that students could learn from a native speaker. Vogt's research design, as revealed in his 1957 proposals submitted to the National institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, was "to describe the changes occurring in the cultures of the Tzotzil and Tzeltal" and "to utilize these data for an analysis of the determinants and processes of cultural change." He went on, The processes in cultural char ge are of two major types the microscopic compusir g specific addition s, subtraction s, or replacemer ts ir cultural cor ter t—
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After his first decade of fieldwork Vogt published the landmark ethnography Zinacantan: A Maya Community in the Highlands of Chiapas. That book earned him the 1969 Harvard Faculty Prize for the "best work of scholarship by a faculty member" and the 1969 Fray Bernardino de Sahagun Prize from Mexico for "the best work by a foreign investigator." As Gary Gossen and Victoria Bricker (1989, p.
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From page 364... ...
Vogt followed his own advice by working for 35 years among the Tzotzil. A second example of Vogt's commitment to use empirical data to deal with major issues can be found in his 1965 article "Structural and Conceptual Replication in Zinacantan Culture." Vogt argued that the Zinacantecos "have constructed a model for ritual behavior and for conceptualization of the natural and cultural world which functions like a kind of computer that prints out rules for appropriate behavior at each organizational level of the society." His familiarity with these general models allowed Vogt to recover a set of specific rules and principles that allows one to understand and interpret a wide range of rituals and ceremonies.
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From page 365... ...
The Zinacanteco way of life emphasizes ceremory Hardly a day passes in Zinacantan Center without some ritual heir g performed as the annual ceremonial cater dar ur folds; hardly a week passes, even in the smaller hamlets, without at least one ceremory being performed by a shaman to cure illness, dedicate a new house, or offer car dies in a maize field (Vogt, 1990, p 101) , In 1970 Vogt and his wife, Nan, coauthored another important article on ritual, "Levi-Strauss among the Maya." Here they drew on their own eyewitness field data to explore ritual features of one curing ceremony, utilizing (1)
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The carving of a new maize field out of the domain of nature also involves land belonging to the Earth Lord, and again he must be compensated with offerings and prayers In addition to his functionalist and structuralist efforts, Vogt made contributions to cultural evolutionary theory. His interests lay not so much in general evolution, or increasing complexity, as in divergent evolution—ethnogenesis, the evolution of daughter cultures *
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. For the most part, Vogt's Chiapas Project was focused on what his professor, Robert Redfield, called "the little community." Vogt, however, saw the need for getting a broader view of the region, and as a result he became a pioneer in the use of aerial photography to interpret settlement patterns, the spacing between houses and hamlets, the region's sacred geography, the principles of Tzotzil cosmology, and Tzotzil worldview.
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were an intricately interwoven set of ecological and cultural factors " Vogt's aerial photos revealed that the crucial ecological constraint was the availability of water in the karstic highlands during the dry season; the more water available in the communal waterhole, the more compact the settlement. The critical cultural factors, on the other hand, revolved around Tzotzil kin groups (for example, a preference for living in patrilocal extended families, the building blocks for patrilineages)
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; a visiting scholar in the Soviet Union, as guest of the institute of Ethnography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, lecturing in Moscow, Leningrad, and Tashkent in 1968 and in Moscow, Leningrad, and the Republic of Georgia in 1989; and a councilor for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1974 to 1978. He organized two Burg Wartenstein Conferences in Austria: one in 1962 on "The Cultural Development of the Maya" and the other in 1980 on "Prehistoric Settlement Patterns," a symposium to honor his longtime friend and Harvard colleague Gordon R
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his application of the phylogenetic model to the cultural evolution of the Maya; (4) his long-term study of a Tzotzil Maya community (1957-1992)
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. Duty as air combat intelligence officer aboard aircraft carrier in the Pacific Attended graduate school at University of Chicago Research assistant for Committee on Human Development, University of Chicago Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, Demobilization Award, fieldwork with the Navaho Fieldwork among Ramah Navaho to study acculturation of Navaho veterans Fieldwork at Fence Lake, New Mexico, to study intercultural relationships among Navaho, Zuni, Spanish Americans, Mormons, and Texans Coordinator of the Comparative Study of Values Project Fieldwork in Nayarit, Mexico, to study acculturation among the Cora and Huichol 1957-1992 Director of the Harvard Chiapas Project, fieldwork among the Tzotzil Maya 1958-1960 Member, Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association 1974-1982 Master of Kirkland House, Harvard University 1985-1988 Chairman, Committee on Latin American and Iberian Studies, Harvard University Retirement dinner, Cambridge, Massachusetts Died on May 13 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
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, National Academy of Sciences Elected to the American Philosophical Society PROFESSIONAL RECORD A.B., University of Chicago M A., University of Chicago Ph.D., University of Chicago Named instructor in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University Promoted to assistant professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University Promoted to associate professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University Promoted to full professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University 1959-1990 Curator, Middle American Ethnology, Peabody Museum 1969-1973 Chair, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University 1990-2004 Professor emeritus, Harvard University
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1994. Fielduork Among the Maya: Reflections on the Harvard Chiapas Project.
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Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1956 An appraisal of prehistoric settlement patterns in the New World.
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1978 Bibliography of the Harvard Chiapas Project: The First Tu enty Years 195 71977. Cambridge: Peabody Museum, Harvard University.
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1983 Ancient and contemporary Maya settlement patterns: A new look from the Chiapas highlands. In Prehistoric Settlement Patterns: Essays in Honor of Gordon R Willey, eds.
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