Events

Patricia Alvarez Astacio is an assistant professor of anthropology at Brandeis University. Patricia is an anthropologist and filmmaker whose scholarly research and creative practice develops in the folds between ethnography, critical theory, sensory ethnography, and the documentary arts. Her most recent works converge on issues of gender and ethnic representations in neoliberal, post-authoritarian Peru. She is currently working on her book manuscript Moral Fibers: Making Fashion Ethical. The book critically explores the Peruvian alpaca wool supply chain analyzing how, through the intervention of development projects, indigenous women artisans and their aesthetic traditions are interpolated into “ethical fashion” manufacturing networks. Moral Fibers unites the fields of political economy, ethnic studies, aesthetic theory, and gender studies to expand our thinking about the parameters and exclusions encoded into “ethical capitalism.” 
Her latest film Entretejido weaves together the different sites and communities involved in this supply chain, bringing viewers into contact with the ways objects we wear are entangled in national racial politics and histories. The film, which premiered at the Havana International Film Festival, extends her long-standing critical engagement with aesthetic politics, sensorial and embodied forms of knowledge. 

She is starting to work on an ethnography and film of the color magenta exploring its symbolic, cultural, racial, gendered, political and industrial life.

Part of the Andean Lecture Series.