MacLaury, Robert E., 1944-

After receiving his bachelor's degree in anthropology and Spanish at the University of the Americas in 1967, the cognitive anthropologist Robert MacLaury spent two years in Santa Mara Ayoquesco de Aldama, Oaxaca, studying Zapotec (Oto-Manguean) language and ethnography. His masters' thesis, "Ayoquesco Zapotec: Ethnography, Phonology, and Lexicon," was accepted at the University of the Americas in 1970.

Beginning in the late-1970s, MacLaury embarked on a study of color categorization in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, out of which grew the collaborative Mesoamerican Color Survey (1978-1981). A prime architect of vantage theory -- a model of categorization that that seeks to account for the active agency of the categorizer -- MacLaury received his doctorate in Cognitive Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989, and published the results of the Mesoamerican Color Survey as Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica: Constructing Categories as Vantages (Austin, Tex., 1997).

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