Julie Velàsquez Runk has spent more than 10 years studying and living with the Wounaan people in the Republic of Panama. (Photo by Peter Frey)

Julie Velàsquez Runk hops out of the desk chair in her Baldwin Hall office and reaches into a niche on her book-lined wall and grabs an ocelot. It isn’t a real cat, of course, but a delicate, realistic sculpture carved from a tagua nut, which can be found in the rainforests of South America and Panama.

For more than a decade, Velàsquez Runk has lived and worked among the Wounaan, one of seven indigenous peoples who have villages in the Republic of Panama. Wounaan are known for their craftwork, including colorful baskets and sculptures from cocobolo wood and the tagua nut, which is as hard as, and resembles, ivory. But Velàsquez Runk’s interests as an anthropologist go much deeper than carved artwork.

In fact, what she is learning about Wounaan, who for most of their history have been semi-nomadic forest dwellers, may help redefine how the outside world sees their life, language and culture. While many traditions are fading, and some of them rapidly, the group works with anthropologists to document and conserve their rich traditions as they see fit.

“In my research I have examined alternative narratives of history, culture, resources and the landscapes of eastern Panama and the political contexts in which they are engaged,” said Velàsquez Runk. “For example, I studied how indigenous Wounaan cosmology relates to landscape and resource use as well as how conservationists understand those same topics.”

Work in the native cultures of the Latino world might seem natural for Velàsquez Runk, whose mother was born in Mexico. In fact, Velàsquez Runk grew up near Detroit and was part of a family blended into the world of the auto industry, where her father was an engineer.

Still, her interest in Latin America is deep and abiding, but it was her love of the outdoors that really led her to a life of field research and teaching. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Grinnell College in Iowa, her M.S. at Duke University and her Ph.D. from Yale University and the New York Botanical Garden. She came to UGA in 2007.

Her current work is a combination of cultural anthropology and political ecology. One of the things that makes her work special is that she works collaboratively with people once simply considered research subjects.

“I have broad interests in peoples’ use of agricultural and forested environments and their negotiation with cultural, political and economic forces in their efforts to both use and conserve environments,” said Velàsquez Runk. “I have researched these topics with Wounaan and, earlier, with Emberá, another group in eastern Panama, since late 1996. I do this by using multiple methods—from satellite image analyses to participant observation to vegetation sampling.”

There are now fewer than 7,000 adult Wounaan, and while many still live in traditional villages of thatched-roofed houses in Panama, the modern world is fully entering their lives each day. Even though Panama is about the same size as South Carolina, it has mountains and rainforests, one of the world’s banking capitols, the U.S. legacy of the canal and military bases and diverse and growing political players.

Most Wounaan weave baskets and carve objects from the hardwood cocobolo or from the tagua nut, also known as “vegetable ivory.” They also have their own language, Wounmeu, and soon Velàsquez Runk hopes to launch a new project aimed at saving and analyzing 60 years of field recordings of Wounaan done by many scientists but not yet systematically catalogued or examined.

“I love working with Wounaan,” said Velàsquez Runk. “They’re wonderful and have many interests, including conserving their culture and history. I’ve been working in that area for
12 years now, and there’s so much we’d like to do.”

She’s also a popular teacher in the anthropology department, where she leads such courses such as the anthropology of eating; technology and development; ethnoecology; Latin American ethnography; and graduate methods.

And has she ever seen a real ocelot in those formidable jungles?

“I saw one on Christmas Eve in 1996 on Barro Colorado Island in Panama,” she said. “And I have actually eaten ocelot—during my field work in Ecuador in 1993.”

Still, her work focuses more on such things as indigenous intellectual property rights of Wounaan—something that will grow only more crucial as the years pass.