Courtesy Morris W Foster
With a history dating back to 1907, the School for Advanced Research’s mission to engage both academics and everyday community members, while fostering a deeper understanding of humanity through arts and anthropology, is a lofty but noble one. It’s also serious business, what with all the scholarly research, Indigenous artist residencies (shout-out to beadwork master Hollis Chitto; Mississippi Choctaw/Laguna and Isleta Pueblos) and public programming. Earlier this month, SAR appointed a new president, Morris W Foster, who succeeded Michael F Brown, who held the role for a decade. Among his myriad qualifications, Foster holds a doctoral degree in anthropology from Yale University; is an emeritus faculty member at the University of Oklahoma; and author of the book Being Comanche: A Social History of an American Indian Community (1992, University of Arizona Press), winner of the the American Society for Ethnohistory’s Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize for Best Book in Ethnohistory. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. (Alex De Vore)
You have a PhD from Yale, which I assume means you can do pretty much whatever you want. What makes SAR the right place for you?
Well, the School for Advanced Research has a long history in anthropology as sort of the preeminent think tank for anthropologists. It’s over 100 years old as an institution, it’s in a really beautiful setting in Santa Fe—which is itself a beautiful setting—and it’s a very unique institution in anthropology, the arts and the humanities as well. There is actually no other independent research center that combines the arts, the humanities and the social sciences. You find some for solely humanities, for arts, for the social sciences, but SAR is the only one that brings those three disciplinary perspectives together. I mean, you get all sorts of disciplines in a university, but a university is so many other things, including athletics…at SAR you have this unique focus that is just not found anywhere else.
Previously, I was at Old Dominion University in Virginia, and before that, the University of Oklahoma for 27 years. My dissertation research was with the Comanche, they range all the way from New Mexico and into Oklahoma and Kansas…there’s a strong scholarly connection for me to Santa Fe and the Southwest. And when [my family] lived in Oklahoma, we’d take frequent trips to Santa Fe.
Will you have a hand in future programming and, if so, do you already have some idea of what you’d like to see happen?
SAR has had a strong public programming presence in Santa Fe. We do public lectures, we’ve sponsored documentary films, we do various kinds of arts events, we’ve had music events on campus and events around food. [Director of Public Programs and Communications] Mary Madigan is working with us to develop a fall package, a summer package, a spring package of public programming that people can look forward to each year. We think SAR is already an important part of the cultural part of Santa Fe, but we’d like to do more.
In a city with so many cultural institutions vying for attention, what does SAR bring to the table?
We have historians and anthropologists who give talks about their work. As I said, we sponsor documentaries that touch on cultural themes, Southwestern themes, global and cultural themes; and we also have one of the strongest collections of Southwestern art in the country, and that’s an important part. We’re not a museum, we’re a research collection, but we do have regular tours the public can sign up for and see the collection. We were just part of an exhibit that went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York called Grounded in Clay—that started in Santa Fe, went to New York and is moving in October to Houston. There are the two parts of SAR: It’s local, it’s Santa Fean, it’s New Mexican, and the other part is its national and international reputation.
During the pandemic, SAR took a lot of its programming online, and that was really the first time we’d done that, and we’ve continued to do that since the pandemic. So you have the opportunity to attend an event in Santa Fe, or to view the lecture streaming. Those are archived on YouTube—with free access, and we have hundreds of videos. And these talks are not esoteric talks, they’re aimed at a public audience who may not have an academic background or anthropology background, but an interest in history, an interest in Indigenous arts.
SAR has, for 50 years, hosted visiting fellows in what we call ‘advanced seminars,’ which bring faculty members from around the world to Santa Fe either for a nine-month residence, or for a weeklong advanced seminar on focused topics. Those focused topics are by design interdisciplinary topics, and we’ve published many edited volumes that have really changed the field of anthropology and other fields in their impact.
