Frances Slaney

Biography

Frances’ PhD fieldwork in Mexico was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in New York. Following fieldwork in the Sierra Tarahumara of northwestern Mexico, she wrote an analysis of duplicated ritual practices among Tarahumaras (Rarámure Pagótame) as a reflection on Spanish colonialism. She also critically re-evaluated the Tarahumara texts written by French surrealist Antonin Artaud. With support from SSHRC post-doctoral and standard research grants, Frances has done archival research in France, England and Canada. She is particularly interested in the career of C. Marius Barbeau at Ottawa’s Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of Civilization) and his collaborations with modern Canadian artists, including landscape painters from the Group of Seven. She is currently completing a book that explores Barbeau’s European education under the direction of R.R. Marett at Oxford and Marcel Mauss in Paris (1907-1910) with particular attention to the question of how this education influenced his early 20th C. museum practices and hopes for a Canadian (proto-) multi-cultural aesthetics and art history.

Research Interest

Frances Slaney is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research areas include Tarahumara ethnography, anthropology of art, material culture, anthropology of museums, ritual, landscape aesthetics, the history of anthropology and anthropological theory. She began her studies in anthropology at the University of British Columbia (BA), and completed them at Université Laval (MA, PhD). As a graduate student, she participated in seminars at the Centre National de Recherche (CNRS) in Paris, and at the Summer Institute for Structuralist and Semiotic Studies in Toronto and in Bloomington, Indiana.