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Image description: A woman with chin-length brown hair smiles. She is wearing a brown shirt and a necklace.
Caption: June C. Nash.
1927–2019
June C. Nash, distinguished professor emerita of anthropology at the City University of New York and the author of numerous books on Latin America, died on December 9, 2019, at the Linda Manor hospice in Leeds, Massachusetts. She was 92.
Nash began as professor of anthropology at The City College of the City University of New York in 1972, and retired as distinguished professor emerita in 1999. Prior to that she was an associate professor of anthropology at New York University. She was an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University from 1964 to 1968.
Her main fields of endeavor were among the Mayan villagers of Chiapas, Mexico, and Bolivian tin miners in the state of Ouroro. Her principle books include In the Eyes of the Ancestors: Belief and Behavior in a Mayan Community (1970); coeditor with Helen Icken Safa of Sex and Class in Latin America: Women’s Perspectives on Politics, Economics and Family in the Third World (1980); We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines (1993); and editor of I Spent My Life in the Mines: The Story of Juan Rojas, Bolivian Tin Miner by Juan Rojas (1992).
Nash combined her interest in post-Marxist theories of globalization and its effect on labor with her book about the General Electric Corporation leaving its hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to go overseas and the impact of the corporation’s strategies and global capitalism on the lives of people living there in her book From Tank Town to High Tech: The Clash of Community and Industrial Cycles (1989).
She ventured into the Lacondon jungle in Chiapas, the center of the Zapatista revolution, to write Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization in 2001.
Among her honors, Nash received the American Anthropological Association’s Distinguished Service Award in 1995 and the Latin American Studies Association’s Kalman Silvert Award in 2004.
June Caprice Bousley was born on May 30, 1927, a daughter of Joseph Bousley, a carpenter, and Josephine Salloway Bousley. She received her BA from Barnard College in 1948, her MA from the University of Chicago in 1953, and her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1960.
She married Manning Nash, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago in 1951 (divorced); Herbert Menzel, a sociologist at New York University in 1972 (widowed); and Frank Reynolds, a professor of religion at the University of Chicago in 1997 (widowed).
She is survived by two children from her first marriage, Eric and Laura.
(Eric Nash)
Cite as: Nash, Eric. 2020. “June C. Nash.” Anthropology News website, November 5, 2020. DOI: 10.14506/AN.1530