Professor David Guss brings anthropology to local communities

When Professor David Guss began his first anthropological study of the Yekeuna tribe in Venezuela, he remembers working in a very different field.

“Anthropology was a different discipline that has changed dramatically since I went to graduate school in the early 1980’s,” Guss recalls. “It was a very small community-oriented discipline that was based on researching other cultures in an effort to critique our own.”

Now as the Chair of the Anthropology Department in the School of Arts and Sciences, Guss says that today Anthropology seeks to explore cultures not as isolated groups, but as they relate with the rest of an interconnected world.

“As anthropologists, we’ve come to realize that the world is a lot more complex and a lot more syncretic,” Guss explained. “The field has changed dramatically in that sense, in that we shouldn’t think of people as pure and authentic, but as connected to the rest of the world.”

This interconnected nature, Guss says, meshes well with the core features of Tisch College. Guss attributes this similarity in philosophies to why more than half of the Anthropology faculty at Tufts works closely with Tisch College.

“We are a very advocacy-oriented department, and we strive as observatory participants to create alliances with the local community,” he said. “We are interested in creating collaborative alliances with different community groups and then forming projects and sharing the results.”

Through his “Lost Theatres of Somerville” project, Guss has shared his own research results with an entire community. In 2000, Guss discovered that Somerville was once home to 14 theaters in the first half of 20th century. Today, only one theater remains.

“Years ago, people used movie theaters for all sorts of things, but mostly as a place to gather,” Guss explained. “Of course, when televisions entered the home, it had a large cost in terms of neighborhood interaction. It created an enormous change.”

Interested in this concept of place and community identification, Guss created the “Lost Theatres of Somerville” project to both historically document Somerville’s theaters while also looking at issues related to place and place making.

“I felt that how people create a sense of place and a real commitment of place was a thing that students would find invaluable, especially later in life,” he said.

Through a class that he taught, Guss and his students collected over 100 oral histories about theaters in Somerville, along with photographs and other important documents. Their findings made the project the largest archive of the neighborhood movie-going experience.

To follow up on the research that they conducted, in 2003 Guss organized a yearlong “Lost Theatres of Somerville” exhibition. Many different parts of the Somerville community worked on the exhibition, including high schoolers, the Mayor’s Office, the local museum, and the last Somerville theater. Once the exhibition ended, Guss created a website to store all of the information he collected.

“It was undoubtedly the best teaching experience I ever had,” Guss said. “The crowning event was definitely when Francis Dee, a famous movie star from the 30’s and 40’s, came to the exhibition and gave a talk about movie culture during that time.”

Following the “Lost Theatres” Project, in 2007-08, Guss worked with New York sound artist Bruce Odland designing another experiential learning project that explored the soundscape of the Tufts environment. Called “Harmony in the Age of Noise,” it featured an eleven-foot tall parabolic dome installed on top of Tisch Library. Over 80 students worked on this semester-long project that allowed people to visit the gazebo to listen to soundmaps created by Tufts students.

In addition to the “Lost Theatres” and “Harmony in the Age” projects, Guss has also been involved in Honkfest, an annual Somerville festival that aims to “retake the streets for horns, bikes, and feet.” Guss initially got involved with Honk after dancing in what he calls “the mother of all Honks:” Bolivia’s Fiesta del Gran Poder, the largest urban Indian celebration in the world.

Professor Guss and his family at Honk

“Like Honk, the Fiesta del Gran Poder is a kind of performance that is all about placemaking,” Guss explained. “It’s all about indigenous people who have moved from the countryside to La Paz and are trying to re-create a city in which they belong. To see that process and dance in that festival, and then to be in Somerville to see Honk arise, I immediately got into Honk.”

For the past two years, Guss has led a Honkfest dance troupe called Endangered Species with Lipstick with over 50 students, community members, and faculty in Honkfest.

“In all of my work, I hope to create a parallel between my academic life and what I do in the world,” Guss said. “Being able to have students participate together in such an ecstatic form has been an act of pure joy.”

In order to continue exploring issues related to place, Guss is currently in the middle of designing a University Seminar Class related to placemaking.