Claudio Lomnitz
Professor, Department of of Anthropology, CSER and Latino/a Studies, Columbia University
Professor Claudio Lomnitz works on the history, politics and culture of Latin America, and particularly of Mexico. His first book, Evolución de una sociedad rural (Mexico City, 1982) was a study of politics and cultural change in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Following the publication of this book, he 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, he concentrated on the social work of intellectuals, a theme that he developed in various works on the history of public culture in Mexico.
Claudio Lomnitz
Professor of Anthropology, CSER and Latino/a Studies, Columbia University
Professor Claudio Lomnitz works on the history, politics and culture of Latin America, and particularly of Mexico. He has a PhD from Stanford in 1987, and his first book, Evolución de una sociedad rural (Mexico City, 1982) was a study of politics and cultural change in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Following the publication of this book, he 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, he concentrated on the social work of intellectuals, a theme that he 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). About a decade ago he began working on the historical anthropology of crisis and 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. His most recent book, The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Zone Books, 2014), is about exile, ideology and revolution.
Professor Lomnitz also writes in non-academic genres, including a a bi-weekly column in the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada. He has also written an historical play on intellectuals and power in collaboration with his brother, Alberto Lomnitz, that won Mexico’s National Drama Award in 2010. They are currently working on a play on the fantasies of military power, based on Prof. Lomnitz's recent historical research.
Working Group Affiliation
Borders and Boundaries, Project Director
Elizabeth Povinelli
Professor, Department of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies, Columbia University
Elizabeth Povinelli's writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism. This critical task is grounded in theories of the translation, transfiguration and the circulation of values, materialities, and socialities within settler liberalisms. Her first two books focused on impasses within liberal systems of law and value as they meet local Australian indigenous worlds, and the effect of these impasses on the development of legal and public culture in Australia. Her most recent book examines how a set of ethical and normative claims about the governace of lowve, sociality, and the body circulate in liberal settler colonies in such a way that life and death, rights and recognition, goods and resources are unevenly distributed there.
Elizabeth Povinelli
Professor of Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies, Columbia University
Elizabeth Povinelli's writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism. This critical task is grounded in theories of the translation, transfiguration and the circulation of values, materialities, and socialities within settler liberalisms. Her first two books focused on impasses within liberal systems of law and value as they meet local Australian indigenous worlds, and the effect of these impasses on the development of legal and public culture in Australia. Her most recent book examines how a set of ethical and normative claims about the governace of lowve, sociality, and the body circulate in liberal settler colonies in such a way that life and death, rights and recognition, goods and resources are unevenly distributed there.
Professor Povinelli diverges from most contemporary approaches to sexuality, gender and the legacy of European colonialism in so far as she brackets sexuality in the first moment and, instead, looks at how the distinction between individual freedom and social bondage subtends and animates most theories and practices of sexuality in postcolonial liberalisms.
Working Group Affiliations
Borders and Boundaries, Project Director
Liberalism’s Others, Project Director