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Claudio Lomnitz

Professor
422 Hamilton Hall


Phone
work: 212-854-0195


Email
cl2510@columbia.edu

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Claudio Lomnitz
Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
Professor
Columbia University

Anthropology, CSER, Latino/a Studies

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 and write a weekly column in Excelsior, a paper in Mexico City.


Representative Publications:

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)

"Elusive Property: The Personification of Mexican National Sovereignty," in F. Myers (Ed.), The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture (2001)

"Passion and Banality in Mexican History: The Presidential Persona," in L. Roniger and T. Herzog (Eds.), The Collective and the Public in Latin America (2000)

"Nationalism as a Practical System: A Critique of Benedict Anderson's Theory of Nationalism from a Spanish American Perspective," in M. A. Centeno and F. López-Alves (Eds.), The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America (2000)

Modernidad indiana: 9 ensayos sobre nación y mediación en México (1999)

"Modes of Citizenship in Mexico," Public Culture (1999)

"Barbarians at the Gate?: A Few Remarks on the Politics of the 'New Cultural History' of Mexico," Hispanic American Historical Review (1999)

"Fissures in Mexican Nationalism," Public Culture (1996)

"Ritual, Rumor and Corruption in the Constitution of Polity in Mexico," Journal of Latin American Anthropology (1995)

"Decadence in Times of Globalization," Cultural Anthropology (1994)

"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)

"Concepts for the Study of Regional Culture," American Ethnologist (1991)

"What's in a Perspective? The History of Mexicanist Anthropology," Reviews in Anthropology (1986)

Evolución de una sociedad rural (1982)
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