Lise Puyo

Bio


A cultural anthropologist from France, I am intersted in material and written evidence of the diplomatic relations between Indigenous peoples and French colonial settler societies in the American Northeast. My research engages with cultural heritage, cross-cultural communication, and museum anthropology, with particular interests in museum policies, ethics, curation, and the appropriation and display of Indigenous heritage.

My experience includes material culture analysis, working with museum collections in the United States, France, and Canada. A significant
part of my research also uses historical written documents to navigate among ecclesiastical sources, French and English colonial sources, Six Nations Haudenosaunee sources, and others who shaped the networks and practices of collecting, from proto-anthropological cabinets of curiosity to ethnographic museums to tribal nations.

At Penn, I serve as a Research Assistant for the project "On the Wampum Trail" supported by the Penn Museum and the Penn Cultural Heritage Center. See: <https://wampumtrail.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/meetlise/>

Wampum scholarship is more than just history, archaeology or museum studies; it also conveys political struggles, historical traumas, and issues of cultural sovereignty dramatically at stake today.

Graduation Year

2022

Subfield

Dissertation Title

Negotiating Between Shell and Paper: Wampum Belts as Agents of Religious Diplomacy

Graduate Status