 |
Associate Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Ph.D. 1986, M.A. 1978, Chicago, B.G.S. 1973, Michigan.
Email:
Research Interests: Cultural history/historical anthropology; colonized societies; postcolonial situations; nationalism; ethnohistory of social movements, gender and sexuality in the Hispanic world; Andes, Spain.
Selected Works:
In Colonial Lives, Richard Boyer and Geoffrey Spurling, eds. Oxford Univ. Press. 2000.
Pathways of Memory and Power, U. Wisconsin, 1998.
Q'aqchas and the Plebe in Rebellion. JLAA, 1996.
El carnaval postcolonial. Revista Andina. 1992.
To Be Indian, To Be Bolivian. In Indian and Nation State in Latin America. Greg Urban and Joel Sherzer, ed. U. Texas Press. 1991. Current News / Projects
Updated July 2009 I write this at the shiny beginning of a year's sabbatical in Toro, Spain, which I share with my wife, Beth Penry (also on research leave from her position in the history department at Fordham), and our two cats, who seem to have forgiven us for packing them off across the Atlantic. Looking out through the rejas of my study window at the morning activity in this small town . . . the tractor next door pulled out some time ago but people are only now heading out to the market . . . I look forward to a steady rhythm of work and life to come (and too quickly, go), and breathe a sigh of relief at having passed the directorship of CLACS into the good hands of Ada Ferrer.
This past year was my third--and busiest--at CLACS. Highlights of the year were co-teaching and advising an excellent group of CLACS MA students, with CLACS Faculty Fellows Carmen Medeiros and Rafael Sanchez. Together, and with the help of CLACS Assistant Director Jen Lewis, Administrative Aide Carolina Pimentel, and talented CLACS GA's and doctoral student assistants Lucas Bessire and Pilar Rau, we organized 15 visiting speakers in two CLACS Research Colloquia. During Fall 2008, Rafael Sanchez and I curated the series “¡Modernity is From Latin America!”, also co-teaching a seminar on the topic, while in Spring 2009, I co-curated (with Jo Labanyi, director of the KJCC, and the support of an NYU Humanities Initiative grant) the CLACS colloquium, “Hauntings: Contested Memory After State Violence in Spain and Spanish America”, accompanied by a course of the same title we taught together. You counted correctly: That’s four co-taught graduate seminars. As if that weren't enough, I attended many of the meetings of WiPLASH (Works in Progress on Latin American Society and History), the student-organized seminar (ably coordinated last year by Naomi Schiller) where doctoral students and faculty from several disciplines at NYU, Columbia, CUNY, and the New School seek critical input on their writing projects. I was also pleased to participate in some of the wonderful CLACS Brown Bag seminars organized by Carmen Medeiros.
Meeting with the faculties of the Anthropology, History, and Spanish & Portuguese departments, I shepherded a proposal for a CLACS Advanced Certificate Program and Ph.D. Presence through bureaucratic obstacles, with the aim of underwriting solid trans-disciplinary area studies training for NYU doctoral students. With Jen Lewis, Carolina Pimentel, and the help of Anthropology's Emily Yates-Doerr, I worked on reapplications for CLACS funding from Title VI and the Tinker Foundation. Announcing to the many grad student winners of CLACS summer research funding reminded me of the importance of those endeavors (for some reports from the field from these grantees, see the CLACS blog: http://blogs.nyu.edu/fas/clacs/). I did manage to get away from NYC a few times: Last summer to Cuzco to explore possibilities for a CLACS program to complement NYU's new Quechua language program (four NYU grads are there as I write this); for ten days in the fall, I was Visiting Professor in the doctoral program in ethnohistory at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago; in the spring, I joined a group of NYU grad students engaged in projects focusing on Buenos Aires/Montevideo (including Anthropology's Lily Defriend, Rachel Lears, and Ram Natarajan, History students Jen Adair and Martin Sivak, and CLACS students Mari Hayman, Tara Sabi, and Christine Weible) in a four-meeting seminar with NYU-Buenos Aires director Alvaro Fernandez Bravo. With support from NYU Global, this last project culminated in a week-long series of events in Buenos Aires focused on struggles over memory of the dirty war's desaparecidos. Finally at CLACS, I was pleased to participate in the launch of CLACS's new Andean and Caribbean Institutes. Look for increased programming on these regions in the coming years.
At NYU Anthropology, advising and training of students is a collective endeavor. As of this year I have chaired or served as member on advisory committees with every one of my talented colleagues. Ramona Perez, Tobias Reu, Naomi Schiller, and Nina Siulc defended their excellent dissertations this past year. Apart from these theses on the art of cooking and feeding in Mexican-American border kitchens, the politics of folkloric dance groups in Quillacollo, community television in Caracas, and the challenge to Dominican citizenship posed by its deportee populace, I worked with students writing up on prosthetics and the body social in Colombia, radio and culture contact among the Totobiegosode people of the Paraguayan and Bolivian Chaco, vedetes and the tabloid cultura popular in Lima, and artisanship and distributed community among the mate burilado carvers of Peru. I strove to maintain a long-distance presence for students engaged in fieldwork, on obesity and the transformation of foodways in Guatemala, archaeological personhood in Mexico, the soundspaces of popular music in Montevideo, and the sociocultural landscape of high-art photography in Mexico City. I advised students preparing projects and writing grant applications to work on markets and the meaning of processed food in Peru, memory, the military, and the dead in Argentina, urban Mapuche in Chile, sex work in Ecuador, cosmetic surgery and the bodily aesthetics of class in Buenos Aires, and the legacy of Al Andalus in Catalan/migrant transcultural communication. I gave advice on host of CLACS MA projects. And along with trying to learn something about all of these things, I wrote a lot of letters for much deserved summer grants, dissertation fellowships, post docs, and jobs, many of which were happily forthcoming. Positions at Colby College, Columbia, Cornell, CUNY, U Mass-Amherst, Michigan, Rutgers, and Temple were among the prizes won.
In courses, colloquia, and scholarly presentations here and there, I did a great deal of talking and thinking about my research and writing projects, and also advanced a bit on the publication front, publishing in the Anuario de la Biblioteca y Archivo Nacional de Bolivia (and in the excellent Spanish translation by Alex Huerta and Rafael Sanchez, and with the original case file), a brief essay on an 18th-century case of transgender titled “Una vida disfrazada: Antonio-nacido-Maria Yta ante la Audiencia de Charcas.” I hope to publish an expanded version of the essay, and an English translation (by NYU students Rachel Lears and Kahlil Chaar) in the near future. The case is the last in the series of social climbing and passing Spaniards in the Indies I am presenting in my book-in-progress “Passing Narrations”, which brings together a series of confessional narratives of colonial social climbers ranging from the 1550s to the early 19th century, whose stories trial records document the rise of the modern subject.
Work also proceeds apace on another book-manuscript-in-progress tentatively entitled “Ghosts in the Ruins,” treating the cultural history and ethnography of popular public performance and the space-time of patrimonio in the Bolivian mining centers (and, respectively, UNESCO-designated monument and intangible masterpiece of intangible heritage) of Potosí and Oruro, Bolivia. Class discussions, and especially, conversations with KJCC director Jo Labanyi, have been critical in rethinking the centrality of ghosts to that project, and to understanding how time condenses and adheres in the organizing schema and materiality of the spaces of social life and the forms of trans-individual personhood that are those spaces' fourth dimensions.
Here in Toro, I continue to think along these lines, about the embodiment of regional identity through cuisine and the terroir of its wines, cheeses, and garbanzos. Discovering how growing attention to patrimonio connects both with the region's marketing ploys in the EU and the emergent Castillian nationalist movement is a matter for evening discussion over tapas in the plaza.
Last, but certainly not least, last fall I welcomed my granddaughter Zoe Juniper Husock (already with two teeth!) into the world.
It was the most demanding and rewarding year, ever.
 Update your faculty profile
|
