About the Speaker
Marisol de la Cadena became an anthropologist in Peru, England, France and the USA. She is a professor in the STS and Anthropology departments at UC Davis.
She works on the interfaces of STS and non-STS, major and minor politics, history, and the a-historical, the possible and the impossible. She enjoys thinking about what she calls ethnographic concepts – those that blur the distinction between theory and the empirical and can indicate the limits of both. Overall, I revel in what I call ‘not knowing’ as an epistemic stance. She realized this in Cuzco, as she co-labored with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, Quechua thinker-doers. They presented her with the eventfulness of the ahistorical, then unfathomable to her, and coached her to grasp that what to me was—a mountain for example–was not only such. Currently, she follows cow-making practices across labscapes and landscapes in Colombia thinking about life and death as intra-connected conceptions.
Funded by Alexander Charles Paul Fort MD ‘04 and Nicholas McLaury Fort MD ‘09 Lectureship on Latin America Fund