Marisol de la Cadena

Marisol de la Cadena

Fellow: Awarded 2008
Field of Study: Anthropology and Cultural Studies

Competition: Latin America & Caribbean

Instituto de Estudios Peruanos

Born in Lima, Peru, Marisol de la Cadena began her career in anthropology in 1986, when, having earned a master’s degree at the University of Durham in England and a DEA at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, she returned to Lima to take up a position as associate researcher at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.  She came  to the United States in 1988 to study at the University of Wisconsin (Ph.D., 1995) and accepted an appointment as assistant professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1996; nevertheless, Ms. de la Cadena continues to have close ties to the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos as well as to the Centro Bartolome de Las Casas in Cuzco, where she has been a research associate since 2001. Currently she is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and from 2005 to 2007 was the director of its Center for History, Society, and Culture.

Her studies abroad as well as her professional experience at academic institutions worldwide naturally led to her cofounding of World Anthropologies Network (http://www.ram-wan.net/html/home_e.htm), which seeks to facilitate the international exchange of ideas among anthropologists.  In addition, every year she returns to Peru to advise students and to participate in seminars and workshops with colleagues; she is also affiliated with the University of Popayán in Colombia and a participant in GEAPRONA (Grupo de Estudios de Aboriginalidad, Provincias y Nación) in Buenos Aires.  Ms. de la Cadena has also been a visiting professor at the Universidad de Barcelona (2004).

Among her publications are Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru (Duke UP, 2000; 2d ed., 2003; Spanish ed., with new preface, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2004) and Archives of Nature-Culture: Indigenous Politics in the Andes (forthcoming); she has also edited Formaciones de Indianidad. Articulaciones Raciales, mestizaje y Nación en America Latina (Bogotá: Envión Eds., 2007) and (with Orin Starn) Indigenous Experience Today  (London: Berg, 2007).  As these titles suggest, her interests include indigeneities, politics, and world anthropologies, among other areas.

Marisol de la Cadena has held fellowships from the NEH and the American Philosophical Society, and has been honored with the Richard Hunt Writing Award from the Wenner-Gren Foundation (1997) and the University of North Carolina’s Hettleman Prize for Outstanding Scholarship (2001).  During her Guggenheim Fellowship term, she will be studying indigenous politics from an Andean perspective.

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