The Representation and Politics of Latin American Anthropology

3 units

This course is focused on the intertwining of anthropology and representation in Latin America, an interrelation that can be traced since colonial times to the present. The specific geo-cultural characteristics of the New World invited, from the beginning, both philosophical and scientific inquiries about human nature, environmental conditions and social organization outside the domains of Western civilizations. The need to represent and disseminate knowledge about the new discoveries inspired both in Europeans and American societies reflections on identity/otherness and cultural development, as well as creative attempts to elaborate symbolic/aesthetic paradigms to capture cultural difference and intercultural relations. Issues of memory, imagination, language, cultural translation and transculturation will be discussed in the analysis of symbolic representation and construction of meaning. “Writing culture” becomes, as observed by James Clifford, one of the most controversial and important enterprises since it involved, both in colonial and in modern times, political assumptions, strategies of stereotyping, notions about hegemony/subalternity, and questions about the creation of world, the nature of language and the incommensurate meaning of collective subjectivity. The course will combine critical/theoretical materials regarding anthropology as a specific cognitive approach and the analysis of literary works, films and paintings that express issues of (self) recognition, alterity and ethnographic imagination in Latin America. Some of the literary works to be studies include narrative by J. L. Borges, M. Barnet, J. M. Arguedas, and Juan Rulfo, among others. Films include Colombian masterpiece “The Embrace of the Serpent” (2015). Paintings focus on Ecuadorian artist Oswaldo Guayasamín and Brazilian Tarsila do Amaral. The course will be conducted in English.