Stanley Brandes holds a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been a professor of anthropology for nearly his entire career. In 2015, he was named Doctor honoris causa by the Universidad de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Madrid. Brandes has lectured widely throughout Europe, Latin America, and Asia and has held teaching appointments in Mexico, Peru, China, and numerous institutions throughout Spain. For more than four decades, he has been conducting fieldwork on the Iberian Peninsula and in Mexico and the United States. Currently, his principal areas of investigation include animal–-human relations, the history of anthropology in Mediterranean Europe, visual anthropology, popular ritual and religion, and the cultural dimensions of food and drink. Brandes is the author of six books, most recently Staying Sober in Mexico City (2002) and Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond (2006) and is coeditor of Symbol as Sense (1980). He has also contributed, through nearly two hundred articles, book chapters, and brief reviews and communications to the fields of folkloristics, anthropological demography, peasant society and culture, death and mourning, alcohol use and abuse, ethnographic photography, and many other areas of study. Further research on the symbolic implications of popular dance can be found in Brandes's 1988 volume, Power and Persuasion: Fiestas and Social Control in Rural Mexico.

Deborah Kapchan is associate professor of performance studies at New York University. A Guggenheim fellow, she is the author of Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (1996) and Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Music and Trance in the Global Marketplace (2007), as well as numerous articles on sound, narrative, and poetics. Kapchan is currently translating and editing a volume titled Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Moroccan Contemporary Poetry and is also the editor of two recent volumes: Intangible Rights: Cultural Heritage in Transit (2014) and Theorizing Sound Writing (in press).

Sylvia Rodríguez is professor emerita of anthropology and former director of the Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies at the University of New Mexico. Her research and publications have focused on interethnic relations in the Upper Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, where, over the past three decades, she has studied the cultural impacts of tourism and conflict over land and water on ritual and on ethnic identity. Currently, she works collaboratively with acequia (traditional irrigation) organizations and researchers on acequia matters and the politics and anthropology of water. Her publications include numerous journal articles, book chapters, and two prize-winning books: The Matachines Dance: Ritual Symbolism and Interethnic Relations in the Upper Rio Grande Valley (1996) and Acequia: Water Sharing, Sanctity, and Place (2006).