Biography
My PhD research focuses on narratives of loss and rupture among the Tukano, Desano, and Hupda peoples of the Papurí River, Northwestern Amazonia. I delve into an idea commonly voiced by indigenous groups in Lowland South America but widely unacknowledged by ethnographers, namely that their ways of life have undergone radical changes, that valuable knowledge has been lost, and that the future of their societies and traditions appears bleak. I hope, thus, to understand local experiences of disruptive change and to reconstruct a native theory of disappearance.
Prior to my PhD, I finished an MPhil in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. My dissertation traced a genealogy of discourses in Latin America about Amerindians as impossible subjects, peoples destined to vanish. Spanning almost four centuries, I showed that in the history of Hispano-American intellectual thought every conception of Amerindian difference has always been at the same time a conception of its disappearance.
My research has been enriched by previous collaborative work with Amerindian peoples in Colombia. Three years at the NGO Amazon Conservation Team allowed me to gain first-hand experience of Amazonia and to cooperate with more than twenty indigenous organizations, the Colombian Ministry of Environment, and the Colombian Constitutional Court for the protection of indigenous territories, governance, and culture. Furthermore, my undergraduate degree in Anthropology at the University of the Andes, Colombia, pushed me every year to do fieldwork helping me develop an ethnographic sensibility. I hope to build on all these previous experiences and lessons to keep working to better understand and support the native peoples of Colombia and South America.
