Her work explores cross-cultural understanding and communication of dreams, ethnomedicine, and aesthetics and focuses on the indigenous Zuni of the Southwestern United States and the Kʼicheʼ Maya of Mesoamerica.
Through her study and practice of the healing traditions of the Kʼicheʼ Maya of Guatemala, Tedlock became initiated into shamanism.
She was the collaborator and wife of the late anthropologist and poet Dennis Tedlock.
[1][2] Barbara Helen Tedlock was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, to Byron Taylor and Mona Gerteresse (O'Connor) McGrath.
[1] Tedlock earned a Bachelor's degree in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967.
[3] In 1987, Tedlock joined the State University of New York, Buffalo anthropology faculty.
The collection featured cultural perspectives that challenge the typical Western conception of dreaming as a phenomenon existing completely separate from objective reality.
[4] Tedlock examined how linguistic conventions mediate the performance and interpretation of dream experience.
[5] Tedlock rejected the existence of any hard boundary between anthropologist and the peoples with whom they interact in the field.
She advocated for narrative ethnography as a methodological innovation that honored and more accurately represented the intertwining, interdependent relationship between anthropologist and the subjects of their research.
[8] Time and the Highland Maya (1992)[9] The Beautiful and the Dangerous: Encounters with the Zuni Indians (2001)[10] The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine.
[11] Teachings from the American Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy (1975)[12] Dreaming: Anthropological and psychological interpretations.
The Beautiful and the Dangerous Zuni Ritual and Cosmology as an Aesthetic System.
The poetics and spirituality of dreaming: A Native American enactive theory.
Writing a storied life: Nomadism and double consciousness in transcultural ethnography.
Text and textile: Language and technology in the arts of the Quiché Maya.
The Sun, Moon, and Venus Among the Stars: Methods for Mapping Mayan Sidereal Space.
Society of Humanistic Anthropology Prize for Ethnographic Fiction (1986) (for "Keeping the Breath Nearby").
[16] American Anthropological Association President's Award (1997) (with Dennis Tedlock)[17]