Books by Joseph P Feldman
La Siniestra Ensayos, 2022
Cuando el Estado elabora el pasado examina las discusiones y debates públicos en torno a la creac... more Cuando el Estado elabora el pasado examina las discusiones y debates públicos en torno a la creación del Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social (LUM), un museo nacional que conmemora y discute las disputas por el pasado del conflicto armado interno que azotó al Perú en las décadas de 1980 y 1990. Surgido de una donación del gobierno alemán que el gobierno peruano rechazó inicialmente, el proyecto del museo con sede en Lima experimentó demoras, cambios de liderazgo y apoyo institucional. Limitados y sin mucho apoyo, el personal que planificaba el LUM ideó estrategias que alinearon al museo con un nuevo tipo de sitios conmemorativos globalizados que buscan representar los paisajes nacionales de posguerra.
El libro analiza histórica y etnográficamente las distintas formas de representación del pasado que emergen cuando una institución estatal busca incorporar y manejar diversas perspectivas sobre el origen y desarrollo de la violencia política en el Perú.
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Memories before the State examines the discussions and debates surrounding the creation of the Pl... more Memories before the State examines the discussions and debates surrounding the creation of the Place of Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion (LUM), a national museum in Peru that memorializes the country’s internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s. Emerging from a German donation that the Peruvian government initially rejected, the Lima-based museum project experienced delays, leadership changes, and limited institutional support as planners and staff devised strategies that aligned the LUM with a new class of globalized memorial museums and responded to political realities of the country’s postwar landscape. The book analyzes forms of authority that emerge as an official institution seeks to incorporate and manage diverse perspectives on recent violence.
Papers by Joseph P Feldman
Anthropological Quarterly , 2023
Caviar or izquierda caviar (caviar left) is a term in Peru that describes privileged actors who a... more Caviar or izquierda caviar (caviar left) is a term in Peru that describes privileged actors who advocate for progressive causes. The label is typically employed by right-wing commentators to criticize politicians, intellectuals, and activists. A systematic analysis of uses of “caviar” in Peruvian newspapers draws attention to the way the term comes to refer to the pursuit of wealth and influence through an embrace of progressive ideals and projects, as opposed to merely pointing to a correspondence between social privilege and left political views. This focus on “benefiting” responds to Peru’s uneven neoliberal development and recent experience of political violence but can also be understood as a reconfiguration of class relations and inequality that is characteristic of populist political styles around the globe. Engaging with scholarship on the place of progressive elites in right-wing populist formations, we suggest that anthropological attention to the meanings surrounding figures like the Peruvian caviar offers opportunities for understanding the role of normative ideas of wealth, inequality, and social mobility in contemporary populist appeals to “the people.”
Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 2022
In a November 2016 speech, Keiko Fujimori emphatically denied rumors that she was experiencing de... more In a November 2016 speech, Keiko Fujimori emphatically denied rumors that she was experiencing depression as a result of her defeat in Peru’s presidential elections. Fujimori’s claim that depression was “for losers” caused a storm on social media, with responses questioning the notion that the politician was emotionally unaffected by the loss. Earlier that month, the latest episode in another, quite different controversy had taken place. Members of an organization responsible for the construction of a mausoleum in Comas—a site branded as pro-Shining Path in the news media—participated in a ceremony honoring those interred at the tomb. This article uses Fujimori’s declaration and discussions surrounding the Comas mausoleum as entry points for considering the relationship between loss, vulnerability, and public discourse in Peru. I argue that expressions of invulnerability offer a useful site for analyzing and critiquing an entrenched refusal to acknowledge the consequences of the country's recent internal war.
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
How enlightening it was to spend a portion of my 2020 lockdown reading four recent books that exa... more How enlightening it was to spend a portion of my 2020 lockdown reading four recent books that examine race, class, and social mobility in Lima. At the same time, reading the works during the pandemic-and in my case, from the United States-it was impossible not to contemplate ways that COVID-19's devastating impact on the coastal capital and throughout the country will shape scholarly understandings of Peru's early twenty-first-century development. Fresh and revealing analyses can feel 'historical' quicker than they usually do, however the aspirations, frustrations, and inequities that Peru specialists have richly documented over the past 15 years or soanalyzing topics like national branding initiatives, transnational migration, extractivism, and the gastronomic boom-seem to impress a new kind of force on the present. Ludwig Huber and Leonor Lamas's Deconstruyendo el rombo intervenes in what will be an evolving conversation about twenty-first-century middle classes in the country. Whereas shortly after the turn of the century scholars could still debate whether or not a Peruvian middle class existed in a meaningful way, developments of the past two decades fundamentally altered the discussion. These changes include, perhaps most obviously, the sustained economic growth Peru experienced and resulting shifts in socioeconomic status and class identification. At least in pre-pandemic times, approximately seven in 10 Peruvians could be categorized as either middle-class or 'emergent' middle class. Yet Huber and Lamas also encourage readers to consider how talking about the 'new middle class' in the Andean nation is not easily disentangled from defending the effects of neoliberal models that politicians, business elites, and news pundits have consistently endorsed since the 1990s. The book's title, a reference to the notion that Peru's recent growth transformed the country's social structure from a 'triangle' to a socioeconomically diverse and less hierarchical 'diamond' (rombo) nicely communicates this point. (For many readers, 'triangle' is likely to evoke Julio Cotler's influential 'triangle without a base' model for understanding elite-subaltern relations [e.g. Cotler 1969]though Huber and Lamas do not seek to revive that specific framework-while the 'diamond' metaphor is most closely associated with the work of marketing specialist Rolando Arellano.
Antropologías del Sur , 2020
Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory and Human Rights, 2020
The anthropology of transitional justice has emphasized the ritual aspects of truth commissions b... more The anthropology of transitional justice has emphasized the ritual aspects of truth commissions but offered less analysis of the conventions through which narratives produced by such institutions come to be viewed over time. A controversy in Peru that centred on a new national museum's possible incorporation of a photo exhibit (Yuyanapaq) created by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2001‐3) provides an opportunity to explore this problematic. Documenting the disagreements that ultimately led to Yuyanapaq's exclusion from the museum, I suggest that an emphasis on ritual outcomes – including perceived shortcomings and failures – is useful for understanding the long‐term trajectory of national reconciliation initiatives.
Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología, 2018
This guest editorial reflects on the problem of ‘information overload’ in social anthropology, su... more This guest editorial reflects on the problem of ‘information overload’ in social anthropology, suggesting that technological advancements such as automated indexing provide an opportunity to question certain assumptions and ingrained practices in the field.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-8322.12345
This article examines the lives of artefacts collected by physical anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička d... more This article examines the lives of artefacts collected by physical anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička during his expeditions to Peru. In 1910 and 1913, Hrdlička travelled to the Andean nation to gather materials that could shed light on the peopling of the Americas, health and disease in pre-Columbian societies, and the purported racial “types” of the region. The study focuses on cultural artefacts the scientist acquired, beginning with these materials’ collection as specimens meant to reveal the racial prehistory of the Andes, and continuing with their classification, display, and exchange as museum objects at the Smithsonian Institution. My analysis of Hrdlička’s Peruvian collection draws attention not only to how scientific representations of Peru and the Andes have shifted over time, but also to the way in which a focus on museum objects can elucidate changing notions about the cultural agency of prehistoric populations and their present-day descendants.
This essay locates the Museo de la Memoria de ANFASEP in Ayacucho, Peru within transnational disc... more This essay locates the Museo de la Memoria de ANFASEP in Ayacucho, Peru within transnational discourses of memorialization and the sociopolitical context of post-conflict Peru. I examine ways in which the museum’s representations of recent political violence embrace and contest “official” historical narratives, how visitors engage with and react to the museum, and perspectives on the institution among residents of Ayacucho. I conclude by assessing the museum’s place in relation to ongoing struggles over history and recognition in Peru and within local and national heritage industries, along with the possibilities and limitations of the ANFASEP Museum’s promotion of a “human rights culture” and politics of remembrance.
This article examines how traditions of imagining the Caribbean as a tropical paradise interact w... more This article examines how traditions of imagining the Caribbean as a tropical paradise interact with new forms of tourism consumption. Depictions of the region have typically positioned Caribbean landscapes, people, and cultures to be exploited and enjoyed by Northern consumers. This pattern of representation has tended to obscure the social processes and power relations implicated in the production of “paradise.” Tobago is frequently presented to international tourists as an “unspoilt” destination—marking the island as the antithesis of Caribbean mass tourism and embracing the language and aesthetics of cultural tourism. Within the logic of “unspoilt Tobago,” culture becomes objectified as a finite resource at risk of being depleted, and the production and presentation of local cultural difference is envisioned as an effortless transformation, free of politics, conflict, and labor.
Book reviews by Joseph P Feldman
American Ethnologist , 2023
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Books by Joseph P Feldman
El libro analiza histórica y etnográficamente las distintas formas de representación del pasado que emergen cuando una institución estatal busca incorporar y manejar diversas perspectivas sobre el origen y desarrollo de la violencia política en el Perú.
Papers by Joseph P Feldman
Book reviews by Joseph P Feldman
El libro analiza histórica y etnográficamente las distintas formas de representación del pasado que emergen cuando una institución estatal busca incorporar y manejar diversas perspectivas sobre el origen y desarrollo de la violencia política en el Perú.