About

My first book, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1910-1991, (2000) is an historical and ethnographic analysis of race relations in the Andes. 

My recent book Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015) is based on conversations with two Quechua speaking men that lived in Cuzco (Peru). Through these conversations we think together about life at the intriguing crossroads where modern politics (and history) and earth-beings (and the ahistorical) meet and diverge, thus exceeding each other. The book is an ethnography concerned with the concreteness of incommensurability and the eventfulness of the ahistorical.

Currently my field sites are cattle ranches and veterinary schools in Colombia. There I engage practices and relations between people, cows, and ‘things’ in general. Thinking at divergent bio/geo interfaces, I am interested in capturing “the stuff” that makes life and death in conditions of dramatic ecological and political change as the country endures extreme droughts and floods and wants to transition between the violence of war to a condition of peace that might not be without violence. 

Research Focus

Located at the interface between STS and non-STS, and working through what I call “ontological openings” (fellow traveler of but different from what has been termed “ontological turn”), my interests include the study of politics, multispecies (or multi-entities), indigeneity, history and the a-historical, world anthropologies and the anthropologies of worlds. In all these areas my concern is the relationship between concepts and methods, and interfaces as analytical sites. More prosaically, I am interested in ethnographic concepts – those that blur the distinction between theory and the empirical because they are not without the latter.

(Areas: Latin America, more specifically Colombia and Peru).