l
Fernando Armstrong-Fumero is a socio-cultural anthropologist who specializes on research in political anthropology, oral history and multiculturalism in Mexico and Latin America. He completed a PhD in 2007 at Stanford University. His doctoral research focused on how traditions of oral narrative that developed in tangent with agrarian and educational institutions in the early 1900s provide the basic repertoire with which rural Maya speakers engage the markedly different realities of contemporary indigenous identity politics. This research on what could be called “the prehistory of vernacular multiculturalism” asks if newer forms of indigenous identity politics necessarily represent a rupture with older ideas about ethnicity and citizenship, or if they are experienced by local people in terms that have been dictated by a collective memory of older national institutions.
Currently, Armstrong-Fumero is beginning a project on the role of oral narrative and traditional knowledge of the lived landscape in promoting the participation of local communities in cultural heritage practice. This is a collaborative, community-based project that will lead to the creation of a series of maps and narrative archives that will be left as a resource for the local school.
At Smith, Armstrong-Fumero teaches courses in political anthropology, the intersections between anthropology and history, Mesoamerican studies, and other themes at the intersection of politics, history and culture in Latin America. |
|
Home
Our Department
Faculty
Major / Minor
Courses
Study Abroad
Career Options
Web Resources
Events
Anthro Club
|
