Research directions
Revolution in the Brackets: Cartographies of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia
Working under subsidies from the US National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, I traced the landscapes of the Bolivian revolution through a multisite study that brought me from the presidential palace to meetings Neo-fascist youth brigades, segregation zones, sites of ethnic violence and the Sucre class, and the "neo-indianist" student-activist meetings at the national university. During this year I will write a book based on this research which uses a deep ethnography based on individual experiences of transformation to examine the external limits of radical change, the relationship between local politics and what Tania Li called the "capitalist system Generalized, "and the limits of symbolic justice in the face of structural inequalities and the legacies of colonialism.
The Anthropology of Law and the Ethics of Everyday Life
I am one of the editors of an international team that produces the Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology for Oxford University Press and recently submitted the command "Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction" to NYU Press for publication at the beginning of 2017. The latter presents an overview of contemporary anthropology of law while making a series of substantive arguments about the disputed place of law in what I claim to be a "post-utopian" world. The first critics of Anthropology and Law have described it as an "audacious and invigorating excursion" and a "jewel of a book to think and teach" (John Comaroff, Harvard University); A book of "sparkling and brilliant prose analysis" (Richard Wilson, University of Connecticut); A study that uses a "global palette to represent in a living and accessible way what contemporary anthropologists have to say about law as meaning, regulation and identity" (David Nelken, King's College London); And a volume that is "likely to become a classic text, reading required in a variety of courses, and a touchstone for years to come" (Rosemary Coombe, York University).
The anthropology of the extreme right and anti-cosomopolitanism
Research on the right in Bolivia since 2008 has led to an emerging accent in the anthropology of what we call "dark shadows". Over the past year I have brought together a group of researchers to examine what Stephen Hopgood described as the "end times" of cosmopolitan imaginations and the rise of right-wing movements, violent nationalism, racism, nativism And new fascisms in order to develop an analytical framework to understand how and why these phenomena continue to chop contemporary social and political life. The volume resulting from this collaboration will appear with Berghahn's Critical Interventions series at the end of 2017 or early 2018.
UNESCO Surveys the World: A Prehistory of Human Rights
I have had a longstanding research interest in both the history and historiography of anthropology's ambiguous relationship with the development of human rights. I have been focusing on the role of an obscure UNESCO entity that has come to be known as the "Philosophers' Committee." This group of eminent philosophers, diplomats, and theologians is credited with discovering the fact that the principles of human rights were, empirically, universal within all cultures around the world at the time the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was drafted in 1947 and 1948. This was despite the fact that the American anthropologist Melville Herskovits had argued that the findings of anthropology did not support such a sweeping conclusion. Research over the last two years in the UNESCO archives in Paris and in the special collections of the University of Chicago Library uncovered a treasure trove of materials that shed new light on these debates. Based on this research, I am preparing a manuscript for Stanford University Press that curates the history of UNESCO's role in the creation of human rights; reappraises and annotates 57 responses to a survey on human rights produced and distributed by UNESCO in 1947 and 1948; and critically analyzes the use and misuse of the UNESCO process within contemporary debates over the origins, legitimacy, and universality of human rights.
Supervision
Ph.D. in progress:
- Dagna Rams
- Attilio Bernasconi
- Loeva La Ragione
- Annette Mehlhorn (with Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Completed Ph.D.:
- Céline Travesi, "The Politics of Knowledge and Ignorance in Australian Aboriginal Tourism" (2016)
Completed M.A.:
- Carol Rojas Duarte, "Last Stop-Switzerland: Processes of Integrating Colombian Refugees Living in French Switzerland" (2015)
- Michael Posse : "El wanas, ou chakitaqlla: Récit ethnographique d'une communauté atomisée dans les Andes centrales du Pérou" (2017)
- Alyssia Piguet : "Mémoire, Vérité et Justice quarante ans après la dictature argentine (1976-1983): Enjeux et tensions autour de la vérité et des ses multiples formes" (2019)
