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Estenssoro Fuchs

Bio: Estenssoro Fuchs is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Cult. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 6 publications receiving 151 citations.
Topics: Cult


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A close reading of the Comaroffs' Of Revelation and Revolution illustrates the ways in which anthropologists sideline Christianity and leads to a discussion of reasons the anthropology of Christianity has languished as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: To this point, the anthropology of Christianity has largely failed to develop. When anthropologists study Christians, they do not see themselves as contributing to a broad comparative enterprise in the way those studying other world religions do. A close reading of the Comaroffs’ Of Revelation and Revolution illustrates the ways in which anthropologists sideline Christianity and leads to a discussion of reasons the anthropology of Christianity has languished. While it is possible to locate the cause in part in the culture of anthropology, with its emphasis on difference, problems also exist at the theoretical level. Most anthropological theories emphasize cultural continuity as opposed to discontinuity and change. This emphasis becomes problematic where Christianity is concerned, because many kinds of Christianity stress radical change and expect it to occur. Confronted by people claiming that radical Christian change has occurred in their lives, anthropologists become suspicious and often explain away th...

514 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyze archaeological and documentary data in a common spatial framework to reconstruct the local-scale negotiation of community and land-use organization during successive colonial occupations by the Inka and Spanish states in the Colca Valley of southern highland Peru.
Abstract: This article explores how constructs of “community” and “landscape” mediate power relations between households and colonial states. I analyze archaeological and documentary data in a common spatial framework to reconstruct the local-scale negotiation of community and land-use organization during successive colonial occupations by the Inka and Spanish states in the Colca Valley of southern highland Peru. Using GIS-based analytical tools, I present a detailed reconstruction of the land-tenure patterns of Andean corporate descent groups (ayllus) registered in colonial visitas from the heartland of the Collagua Province. I then compare these land-tenure patterns to archaeological settlement patterns from the Inka occupation (C.E. 1450–C.E. 1532) and subsequent early Colonial Period occupation up to the forced resettlement of the local populace into compact, European-style reduccion villages in the 1570s. This analysis reveals how both Inka and Spanish colonialist projects for reordering and rationalizing local community and land-use organization were met by local understandings and interests that emerged from patterns of land tenure, residence, and the features of the built environment.

85 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the 1990s, Africanists challenged the model, asserting that it overstated the cultural diversity of sub-Saharan Africa, that it exaggerated the degree of ethnic heterogeneity characterizing the human cargoes of most slavers, and that it understated the possibilities for victims of the slave trade to reconstitute coherent ethnic cultures in the new World as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: DuRinG the 1970s anthropologists Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price proposed a model to explain identity formation among Africans and African-descended peoples in plantation America. For two decades their creolization model dominated American slave culture interpretations, but in the 1990s Africanists challenged the model, asserting that it overstated the cultural diversity of sub-Saharan Africa, that it overstated the degree of ethnic heterogeneity characterizing the human cargoes of most slavers, and that it understated the possibilities for victims of the slave trade to reconstitute coherent ethnic cultures in the new World. The heated controversy that emerged pitted a group of mostly Africanist scholars who might reasonably be considered the intellectual descendants of Melville J. Herskovits against mostly Americanist disciples of Mintz and Price. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database promised tools that could offer much more specific understandings of the relationships between Old and new World African cultures, and various historians sought to understand the degree and rate of cultural change that occurred during the Middle Passage and American slavery.1 notwithstanding the intensity of these debates, empirical work has increasingly rendered the dispute meaningless. What Mintz and

71 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article examined the controversial fashion of veiling in the early modern Spanish world and argued that this fashion and the controversy it generated were closely tied to Spain's rise as an imperial power, especially to the new forms of urbanism that developed in the ancient city of Seville and the much younger capitals of Madrid and Lima.
Abstract: This article examines the controversial fashion of veiling in the early modern Spanish world. Working across the media of art, literature, and the law, it explores the intersecting ways in which moralists, legislators, playwrights, painters, and poets constructed the figure of the veiled lady ( tapada ) as a social type at once alluring and deeply unsettling. We provide an explanation of the terminology and taxonomy of veiling, with illustrations to show the various styles of face-covering popular in early modern Spain. We then argue that this fashion and the controversy—as well as the entertainment—it generated were closely tied to Spain’s rise as an imperial power, especially to the new forms of urbanism that developed in the ancient city of Seville and the much younger capitals of Madrid and Lima. As these rapidly expanding cities offered their inhabitants new spaces of social interaction and new possibilities for social mobility, wealth, and consumerism, their changing urban landscapes and complex demographics also generated anxieties of failure and deception. Cultural concerns regarding religious practice, the regulation of domestic and public space, and racial and class distinctions coalesced around the figure of the tapada . Seductive, mysterious, and rebellious, she absorbed the fantasies and fears of urban life in three of the most dynamic cities of imperial Spain.

67 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The colonial past is present in our world in many ways, some conspicuous, some unnoticed as discussed by the authors, and it shapes politics, economics, artistic and intellectual life, linguistic practices, forms of belonging or international relations.
Abstract: The colonial past is present in our world in many ways, some conspicuous, some unnoticed. In Europe, as in formerly colonised countries around the globe, it is embodied in material culture, in monuments, architecture, libraries, archives and museum collections, in alimentary diet, dress and music, but also in continuing flows of commodities, images and people. In perhaps less tangible but no less crucial ways, it shapes politics, economics, artistic and intellectual life, linguistic practices, forms of belonging or international relations. It informs the rhetoric and the categories mobilised when Europeans deal with migrants from other continents, define standards of good governance or conceive development projects, or when people outside Europe deal with European tourists, businessmen, NGO workers or anthropologists. The presence of the past is also a field of contest. Far from there having today a shared vision of the colonial past, conflicting memories and narratives divide scholars, but also those who somehow define themselves in relationship to the colonial moment.2 Exploring this double mode of presence of the past offers anthropologists a wide field of inquiry. The articles brought together in this issue may be seen as contributions to an anthropology of colonial legacies, which I will try to outline here.

50 citations