Dr Elizabeth Ewart

Dr Elizabeth Ewart is Associate Professor in the Anthropology of Lowland South America.  Her main research is with indigenous people in Central Brazil where she has lived and worked with Panará people. Her doctoral research focused on Panará concepts of self and other by examining the relationships between Panará people and other indigenous groups of the area as well as non-indigenous people.

With an undergraduate degree in art history, she has a long-standing interest in the material and visual aspects of Amerindian lived worlds, including body adornment, beadwork (of which there is a small Panará collection in the PRM), garden design, village layout and concepts of beauty. She is also interested in the anthropology of everyday practices, including child rearing and gardening.

More recently, she has been developing research in southwestern Ethiopia (together with Dr Wolde Tadesse), on local agriculture and food production, specifically in relation to a local staple, enset (Ensete ventricosum or Abyssinian banana), exploring the manifold connections between cultivation, cooking, animal husbandry, land custodianship and sense of wellbeing among Gamo communities in the southern Ethiopian highlands.