This talk examines mourning and worldmaking through community action and art in the wake of violence, dispossession, and collective loss. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with communities in southern Colombia and rural Maine, Tate considers the intersections, possibilities and limitations of rights activism and art through an exploration of the visual repertoires and material practices of Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo and Passamaquoddy artist Jeremy Frey. This program is free and open to all, refreshments will be provided.
About the speaker:
Winifred Tate is a political anthropologist and professor at Colby College exploring placemaking, political imaginaries and struggles for belonging and political change in Colombia and Maine. She is the author of the award-winning Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia (University of California Press 2007) which argues that the power of human rights emanates not from claims of universality but from its resonance with local political culture and agendas. Her second book, Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats: U.S. Policymaking in Colombia (Stanford University Press, 2015), examines the design, implementation, and assessment of Plan Colombia, the evolution of Colombia political violence, and the practice of foreign policy by the US congressional staff, State Department and Pentagon officials, human rights advocates, and peasant coca farmers. Her current research, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, examines how rural people in Downeast Maine navigate formal and informal work, experiencing community decline even as they work to generate resilient community relations in conditions of ongoing economic precarity and organized abandonment. Her research and teaching in visual anthropology explores how anthropologists use visual representations as data in the analysis of cultural systems of meaning; working with the Colby Museum of Art, she incorporates teaching visual analysis into all her courses and has developed specialized courses including The Art and Politics of Revolution in Latin America; Colombian Politics Through Film, and Representing the Other.
Awards: the 2009 Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association for outstanding work in the social sciences and the humanities on Latin America published in English; the 2009 Sharon Stephens Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society, awarded to a first book that speaks to contemporary social issues with relevance beyond the discipline and beyond the academy; and the 2007 Michael Jiménez Prize for outstanding work in Colombian Studies from Latin American Studies Association.