Biography
I
work on the history, politics and culture of Latin America, and particularly of
Mexico.
I received my PhD from Stanford in 1987, and my first book, Evolución de una sociedad rural (Mexico
City, 1982) was a study of politics and cultural change in Tepoztlán, Mexico.
After that I developed an interest in conceptualizing the nation-state as a
kind of cultural region, a theme that culminated in Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National
Space (California,
1992). In that work, I also concentrated on the social work of intellectuals, a
theme that I developed in various works on the history of public culture in
Mexico, including Modernidad Indiana
(Mexico City, 1999) and Deep Mexico,
Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minnesota, 2001). I am
currently working on the historical anthropology of crisis and recently
published Death and the Idea of Mexico
(Zone Books, 2005), a political and cultural history of death in Mexico from the
16th to the 21st centuries. I serve as editor of the journal Public Culture.
Representative Publications:
(in
press) Chronotopes of a Dystopic Nation: The Birth of “Dependency” in
Late Porfirian Mexico.In Clio/Anthropos:
Exploring the Boundaries Between History and Anthropology,edited by Andrew Wilford and Eric
Taggliatozzo, Stanford, Stanford University Press; Portuguese translation
appearing in the journal Mana 15 (1),
2009.
(in press) Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican
Revolution.Representations.
Death and the Idea of Mexico (2005);
"Times
of Crisis: Historicity, Sacrifice, and the Spectacle of Debacle in Mexico City," Public Culture (2003);
"The
Depreciation of Life During Mexico City's
Transition into the Crisis," in J. Schneider and I.
Susser (Eds.), Wounded Cities:
Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World (2003)
Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of
Nationalism
(2001)
Modernidad
indiana: 9 ensayos sobre nación y mediación en México (1999)
"Functions
of the Form: Political Ritual in the Partido Revolucionario Institucional's
1988 Presidential Campaign," in D. Levine (Ed.), Constructing Culture and Power in Latin America
(1993)
Exits from the Labyrinth:
Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space (1992)
Evolución
de una sociedad rural (1982)
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