Linda received her first degree in nursing, before turning her attention to graduate studies in sociology. While still a graduate student, she became involved as a consultant in highway planning doing socio-economic impact assessment. After completing her master's and doctoral degrees at the...
Elizabeth Finnis
I completed my PhD in Anthropology at McMaster University in 2006, and then undertook a SSHRC-funded post-doctoral fellowship at the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for Society, Technology, and Development at McGill University.
My research addresses issues of political ecology of food, diet, and agricultural transitions; food transitions and food sovereignty; environment-economic tensions that emerge in the context of smallholder farmer households; and development and identity. Geographically, I am interested in South Asia (India & Nepal) and South America (Paraguay). Some of my previous research has examined health care access and experience of lesbians and gay men living in Northern Ontario.
Some of my current research includes working with small-scale farmers on issues of food sovereignty, agriculture, and social/physical environmental change in rural Paraguay.
Some of my current research involves a project looking at rural livelihoods, social change, agricultural transitions and food practices among smallholder families in a community in rural Paraguay. This project is being undertaken with 3 agronomy collaborators at the Universidad Nacional de Asuncion (Paraguay).
My teaching interests include: qualitative research methods, anthropological perspectives on health and the body, emerging issues in anthropological theory, and topics relating to agriculture, food, environment, and development.
Finnis, E (ed). 2012. Reimagining Marginalized Foods: Global Processes, Local Places. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Finnis, E. 2010. "Every place has roads in the plains": Public spaces and private markets in arguments for development and inclusion in South India. Anthropologica 52(1):141-153.
Moffat, T. & E. Finnis. 2010. Dietary Diversity, Dietary Transitions, and Childhood Nutrition in Nepal: Questions of Methodology and Practice. In Human Diet and Nutrition in Biocultural Perspective: Past Meets Present. Moffat, Tina and Tracy Prowse, eds. New York: Berghahn Books, pp 133-151.
Finnis, E. 2009. "Now it is an easy life": Women's accounts of millets, cassava, and labour requirements in South India. Culture and Agriculture 31(2):88-94.
Finnis, E. 2008. Economic Wealth, Food Wealth, and Millet Consumption: Shifting Notions of Food, Identity and Development. Food, Culture and Society 11(4):463-485.
Finnis, E. 2007. The political ecology of dietary transitions: Agricultural change, environment, and economics. Agriculture and Human Values 24:343-353.
Finnis E. 2006. Why Grow Cash Crops? Environmental Uncertainty and Economic Aspiration in South India. American Anthropologist 108(2):363-369.











