University of California, Berkeley
Graduate Student, Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley, Program in Critical Theory, Townsend Humanities Lab
Ph.D. Candidate
Thesis Title: Intimate Landscapes: Uncertain Legacies of the Hacienda in Post-Revolutionary Bolivia
|
Charles Hirschkind
Saba Mahmood Judith Butler |
About
I am a doctoral candidate in social and cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. My research hinges on the relationship between historical narrative, political subjectivity, and the materiality of objects and selves. My work is geographically located in central Bolivia, and is focused on the time period from 1945 to 2012.
At present I am writing my dissertation, based on 15 months of fieldwork among Quechua and Spanish-speaking residents in the Ayopaya province of Cochabamba, Bolivia. The Ayopaya landscape is scattered with the remains of the hacienda past, including crumbling adobe buildings and walls, old mills, and abandoned as well as operating silver, sodalite and antimony mines. My dissertation explores the ways that material relations and sites are transformed by new historical understandings and municipal projects linked to the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government's "cultural revolution." I ask about the tensions that exist between a government narrative of revolutionary history, on the one hand, and a material mnemonics of hacienda labor and sociality, on the other. In this way, I explore the intimate presence of the Bolivian state in everyday life, a presence that, I argue, is reshaping both landscapes and embodied relations.
My more general research interests include the study of emotion and materiality, nationalism and time, the ethics of memory, aesthetics, law, and political subjectivity.
Contact Information
| Address: | |
