User:Johnvallison

John Victor Allison is a cultural anthropologist. Born in Los Angeles, California in 1937, in a working class background, his father was one of the two founders of he Southern California Steel Molders' Union, and particapted in the 1920s and 1930s efforts to establish workers' unions in the USA against violent resistance from the US government and the military. After his family moved to Bakersfield, California, he worked summers picking cotton and harvesting fruits and vegetables alongside the farm workers from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Later, after military service in Korea and Peace Corps in Liberia, he returned to the San Joaquin Valley to work with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers to organize the field workers into a union force. Later he participated in the counter-culture movement in the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury District, becoming affiliated with the Young Socialist Workers effort to end the war in Vietnam, and continued to participate in resistance to the nuclearization of the military, industrializtion of Public Lands, and the denial of self-determination to American Indian nations and other indigenous peoples. He worked as the Klamath Tribes' anthropologist for 5 years, compiling their first ethnographic landscape inventory of places that the tribes depend on for their landscape-seated cultural identity (The Cultural Landscape of the Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin Peoples: Spirit, Nature, History). He has participated in the Keepers of the Treasures and in the World Archaeological Congress's efforts to build an anthropology and archaeology more representative of the diverse worldviews of the different cultures that are trying to survive in this increasingly homogenized world.