Whatever of life’s challenges you may face, remember always to look to the mountaintop, for in doing so you look to greatness. Remember this and let no problem, however great it may seem, discourage you nor let anything less than the mountaintop distract you.
Alfonso Ortiz (1939-1997)
Professor of Anthropology
University of New Mexico

 

In 1999, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a Challenge Grant to the University of New Mexico’s Department of Anthropology and the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in order to found the Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies. The Ortiz Center provides a gathering place where members of the academic community meet with their counterparts from diverse communities and cultures beyond the academy for mutual study, debate, and cultural expression and exchange. The center’s collaborative public programs—such as films, colloquia, exhibits, performances, and conversation—encourage new forms of teaching, research, and shared ideas among the students, staff, and faculty of the university and people who typically have remained outside the academy: independent scholars, elders, artists, teachers, healers, musicians, thinkers, storytellers, and other recognized holders of traditional and community wisdom. The Ortiz Center is a meeting ground in the broadest sense of the word: a circle of learning, of teaching, and of play, where all participants engage as equals.

 

Mission Statement

The mission of the Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies is to create opportunities for diverse, collaborative, community-inspired cultural programs in the humanities and public anthropology, including research, teaching, museum collection and exhibition, and intellectual dialogue on critical issues of contemporary and historical importance in human culture and society. Named for the late Alfonso Ortiz, a University of New Mexico professor of anthropology for twenty-three years, the Center builds on his work to eliminate barriers between the institutional communities of the university and the communities of the world at large.