Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Marianne Stoller

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00141801-3789177

1527-5477

Sarah Hautzinger,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Marianne Stoller, cultural anthropologist, ethnohistorian, and archaeologist of the American Southwest, passed away on 13 December 2015 in Colorado Springs. Stoller was a founding member and impactful teacher in the Anthropology Department at Colorado College (CC), where she taught for twenty-nine years and also cofounded the Southwest Studies program, the first regional interdisciplinary program in the country.As she grew up in the small southern Colorado town of San Luis in the San Luis Valley, the seeds of Stoller’s anthropological curiosity were sown in a beautiful, complex landscape. Attending the San Luis Valley’s best four-year college, Adams State College in Alamosa, Stoller graduated in 1949 with a BA in art. She went on to receive her master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Denver in 1955, focusing on the anthropology of Oceania. Stoller was a Fulbright Scholar from 1951 to 1952, traveling to New Zealand to study Maori artwork, as well as to Fiji and Tahiti.Stoller received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. From the East Coast, she migrated back to the mountain west, her first and true home. Stoller first joined the Anthropology Department in 1969 on a part-time basis; in 1979, she was made a full-time member of the faculty as an associate professor. In 1980, she received tenure. She twice chaired the Anthropology Department and served as director for the Southwest Studies summer institutes. Though she retired from teaching at CC in 1998, Stoller remained as active as ever in anthropological and ethnohistorical causes.One of Stoller’s greatest achievements was as an ethnohistorical expert witness in a high-profile legal case that returned usufruct rights to an area that included Stoller’s hometown in Colorado’s San Luis Valley; she received an award from the Colorado Lawyers Commission for this work. Stoller served as president of the American Society for Ethnohistory in 1984, and as a councillor in previous years.Another significant part of Stoller’s legacy is rooted in archaeology. Leading summer digs throughout the 1980s and 1990s in La Cienega, New Mexico, at a site not far from a small neighborhood, Stoller and her teams helped unearth invaluable pieces of regional history, including the largest seventeenth-century Spanish colonial settlement in New Mexico. This process took years, and each time the CC teams of students and college alumni returned to the site, they would find new structural foundations, boundaries, artifacts—fitting history together, piece by piece. As evidence of the power of these experiences, “the Diggers” continue to schedule reunions to this day. Stoller also led numerous alumni tours of the Southwest and other regions, including the California missions and the Canadian Rockies. Through these tours, as well as through her passionate engagement and deep knowledge of her subjects, Stoller helped raise more than $50,000 in scholarship funds for the Woman’s Educational Society at Colorado College.Marianne Stoller is survived by a daughter, Moana Kutsche; a granddaughter, Brigid Kathleen Ehrmantraut; and a nephew, Fred Stoller Tessler.