BA/MA Anthropology, CSUF

 I love teaching at Saddleback College about the Southern California Indians, Cultural Anthropology, and Culture and Food.  As the Museum

Director at Mission San Juan Capistrano for many years, my focus was the anthropology of the Native California Indians, their ethno-botany, and the anthropology of the Missionization process.

I have assisted Xela-Aid, an NGO Humanitarian Group, in medical, dental, and women’s health services for the Indigenous Maya (Guatemala) in the Highlands of Guatemala. My research there included children’s Anthropometry studies, as well as creating and conducting children’s health seminars in Spanish.

As a Certified Nutritional Consultant, I am especially interested in eating patterns of Western culture.  I am particularlly focused on how such eating patterns are becoming more and more globalized and are affecting the health and nutrition of underdeveloped countries.  My current research and writing project is a book on culture and food from Paleolithic times to the present. This research led to the development of the curriculum for Anthropology 42, Culture and Food, offered for the first time at Saddleback in the Fall of 2008.  Our human evolutionary constitution is not compatible with the eating patterns of the 21st century.  For optimum health, awareness of our bio-cultural past should be a priority.

I have written three ethnographies and am working on a fourth.  I have written, two children’s anthropology books: Africa’s Sweet Connection, is about a cultural tradition of the Borana people of Africa, and

If You Give a Padre a Peppertree, is a child's glimpse of the California Mission system.