New College Student Lorna Hadlock Receives Gilman Scholarship to Study in Peru
Sarasota, Fla., — June 9, 2011 — Lorna Hadlock, a third-year anthropology/area studies major from Sarasota, Fla., will be spending the next academic year (two semesters) in Peru under a Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship. She is the 13th New College student in the last six years to receive a prestigious Gilman Scholarship, which is sponsored by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Hadlock will be based in Alto Amazonas, Loreto, and plans to conduct an ethnography of indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon. She will return in December 2011 for a month to confer with her faculty advisors, digest her notes, do additional library research and organize her theoretical framework before returning to spend the last five months working with the Kokama-Kokamila people. She will then return to New College to complete her senior thesis.
Ethnography is an effort to holistically understand a culture through in-depth, long-term study, primarily utilizing participant observation and interviews.
Hadlock’s love of other cultures, in particular the Latino people, derives from her days at Sarasota’s Pine View School for the Gifted, where she was involved in People to People International and in promoting world peace through understanding. She spent her senior year in high school as a dual-enrolled student at New College.
“Initially I wasn’t planning to stay at New College, but I just loved it, and I also fell in love with the study of anthropology,” recalls Hadlock. “It tied in perfectly with my natural curiosity about other people and how each culture is unique. The anthropology department here is awesome. New College allowed me to do special projects even in my first year.”
While in Peru, Hadlock will be conducting independent research through Off Campus Study tutorials and with faculty guidance, rather than taking classes through a study abroad program, which she says would not be possible at other schools. She will stay in close contact with her faculty advisor, anthropology professor Maria Vesperi, and anthropology professor Anthony Andrews, as well as informally with Dr. Rodrigo Montoya of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru.
“I will be concentrating primarily on myth, ritual, use of plants and interaction with nature,” explains Hadlock. “I believe this theoretical framing is important to contribute to a sophisticated understanding of the indigenous people of the Amazon, who are often unseen players in world environmental policy. It is important to incorporate their viewpoints in worldwide environmental consensus and change. Furthermore, many Amazonian tribes offer novel ways of looking at the world underappreciated by Western thinkers. As an anthropologist I hope to explore and give voice to those underrepresented peoples and provide information that can help worldwide efforts at culture-friendly conservation of this important ecosystem.”
This will be Hadlock’s third trip to Peru. In January 2008, she traveled to the Peruvian Amazon, where she spent four days on a dugout canoe in the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve as part of an Independent Study Project. Returning to Pacaya-Samiria as an ethnographer, she views being there for an entire year as a real advantage, even though it means she will be completing her bachelor of arts degree in five years instead of four.
“I hope that I’ll learn something about life from the people that I meet and create long- term relationships with people I’ll be working with,” she says. “Living there for this period of time will give me the kind of insights and understanding that will surely inspire me and fuel my thesis, which I hope will be of publishable quality, perhaps fit for print in an academic anthropological journal.”
Hadlock says that the Peruvian part of the Amazon is one of the most diverse biologically, least studied culturally, and most endangered both culturally and biologically. “I am especially interested in the Amazon because of the complexity and sophistication of cultures in addition to the rich biodiversity,” she says. “I hope to help mitigate the paucity of knowledge on Amazonian societies as a professional anthropologist. I am fluent in Spanish after many years of study, and I have prepared carefully through coursework and previous exposure to Peru, making this an ideal location for my undergraduate thesis research.”
After she graduates from New College, Hadlock plans to attend graduate school in anthropology to continue her research and language study of the Kokama and nearby tribes.
“For the long-term, I aspire to conduct anthropological research in Latin America, publish work, and become a college professor,” she says. “I believe my research project in the Peruvian Amazon is necessary to fulfill my life goals.”
The Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program was created in 2000 to provide scholarships for study abroad to U.S. undergraduates with financial need, including students from diverse backgrounds and students going to non-traditional study abroad destinations. The federally funded program is administered by the Institute of International Education. For more information on the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship program, visit the U.S. State Department’s website at http://exchanges.state.gov/globalexchanges/index.html.