Thomas A. Abercrombie

Associate Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Ph.D. 1986, M.A. 1978, Chicago, B.G.S. 1973, Michigan.

Office Address: Rufus D. Smith Hall 25 Waverly Place New York, NY 10003
Email:
Phone: 212-998-8570
Fax: 212-995-4014

Areas of Research/Interest

Cultural history/historical anthropology; memory and patrimonial regimes; colonialism and postcolonial situations; nationalism; ethnohistory of Andean societies, gender and sexuality in the Hispanic world; food and place; Andes, Spain.

Publications

“Una vida disfrazada en el Potosí y La Plata colonial: Antonio-nacido-María Yta ante la Audiencia de Charcas,” Anuario de Estudios Bolivianos, Archivísticos y Bibliográficos, 2009, pp. 3-45.
Caminos de la memoria y del poder: etnografía e historia en una comunidad andina. La Paz: Institut Francais d’Etudes Andines / Instituto de Estudios Bolivianos, October , 2006.  Translation, with a new preface, of Pathways . . . (below)
 “Mothers and Mistresses of the Urban Bolivian Public Sphere: Postcolonial Predicament and National Imaginary in Oruro’s Carnival.” In After Spanish Rule, Andrés Guerrero and Mark Thurner, eds. Duke University Press, 2003.
“La perpetuidad traducida: del ‘debate’ al Taki Onqoy y una rebelión comunera peruana.” In Incas e Indios Cristianos: Elites indígenas e identidades cristianas en los Andes coloniales, pp. 79-120. Jean-Jacques Decoster, ed. Cuzco: Centro Bartolome de las Casas, IFEA, Asociacion Kuraka, 2002.
 “Affairs of the Courtroom: Fernando de Medina Confesses to Killing His Wife.”  In Colonial Lives: Documents on Latin American History, 1550-1850, pp. 54-76. Richard Boyer and Geoffrey Spurling, eds. Oxford University Press, 2000. 
Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History Among an Andean People.  (603pp). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 
 “Tributes to Bad Conscience: Charity, Restitution, and Inheritance in Cacique and Encomendero Testaments of 16th-Century Charcas.”  In Dead Giveaways, pp. 249-89. Susan Kellogg and Matthew Restall, eds.  University of Utah Press, 1998.
“Q'aqchas and La Plebe in Rebellion: Carnival vs Lent in 18th-Century Potosí.”  Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2(1): 62-111, 1996.
 “To Be Indian, To Be Bolivian: Ambivalence and Ambiguity in the Construction of Ethnic and National Identities in Bolivia.” In Nation-States and Indians in Latin America, pp. 95-130. Joel Sherzer and Greg Urban, eds.  Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1991.

Current News / Projects

Updated July 2010
As my sabbatical in the small town of Toro, Spain draws to an overly-rapid close, after a productive year of research and writing and recharging of batteries, I again find myself looking out through the rejas of my study window at the morning activity in this small town . . . the tractor next door idling just a few feet away, while people are begin to pull their carts out their doors to go to market. In spite of my anticipatory nostalgia, I look forward to a return to teaching in the fall.  I will be co-teaching a graduate course on Space, Patrimony, and Sovereignty in the Latin American City with Rafael Sanchez of CLACS, which runs in concert with a CLACS speaker series we are curating in the KJCC auditorium. With help from three preceptors, I will again offer a Latin America focused course for the college’s MAP program. In Spring 2011, I will be offering my graduate seminar on Memory, Heritage, History, and Narrative, while also teaching an undergraduate course on the Anthropology of Food and Eating. I aim to again participate in the meetings of WiPLASH (Works in Progress on Latin American Society and History), the student-organized seminar where doctoral students and faculty from several disciplines at NYU, Columbia, CUNY, and the New School seek critical input on their writing projects. 
At NYU Anthropology, advising and training of students is a collective endeavor.  As of this year I have chaired or served as member on advisory committees with every one of my talented colleagues.  Although on sabbatical this year, I remained in contact with graduate advisees engaged in fieldwork or writing their dissertations (on prosthetics and the body social in Colombia, radio and culture contact among the Totobiegosode people of the Paraguayan and Bolivian Chaco, vedetes and the tabloid cultura popular in Lima, artisanship and distributed community among the mate burilado carvers of Peru, the transformation of foodways in Guatemala, archaeological personhood in Mexico, the soundspaces of popular music in Montevideo, the sociocultural landscape of high-art photography in Mexico City, markets and the meaning of processed food in Peru, memory, the military, and the dead in Argentina, urban Mapuche in Chile, sex work in Ecuador, cosmetic surgery and the bodily aesthetics of class in Buenos Aires, and the legacy of Al Andalus in Catalan/migrant transcultural communication.  And along with trying to learn something about all of these things, I wrote a lot of letters for much deserved summer grants, dissertation fellowships, post docs, and jobs, many of which were happily forthcoming.  Positions at Colby College, Columbia, Cornell, CUNY, U Mass-Amherst, Michigan, Rutgers, and Temple, along with prestigious dissertation fellowships and post-docs were among the prizes won.
During 2009-2010, I advanced a good deal on the writing front, and also a bit on the publication front, publishing in the Anuario de la Biblioteca y Archivo Nacional de Bolivia (and in the excellent Spanish translation by Alex Huerta and Rafael Sanchez, and with the original case file), an essay on an 18th-century case of transgender titled “Una vida disfrazada: Antonio-nacido-Maria Yta ante la Audiencia de Charcas.”  I have been working on an expanded version of the essay, and an English translation (by NYU students Rachel Lears and Kahlil Chaar) for submission in the near future.  The case is the last in the series of social climbing and passing Spaniards in the Indies I am presenting in my book-in-progress “Passing Narrations”, which brings together a series of confessional narratives of colonial social climbers ranging from the 1550s to the early 19th century, whose stories trial records document the rise of the modern subject.
Over the sabbatical year I gave special priority to completion of another book-manuscript-in-progress tentatively entitled “Ghosts in the Ruins,” treating the cultural history and ethnography of popular public performance and the space-time of patrimonio in the Bolivian mining centers (and, respectively, UNESCO-designated monument and intangible masterpiece of intangible heritage) of Potosí and Oruro, Bolivia.  Class discussions during 2008-2009, and especially, conversations with KJCC director Jo Labanyi, had been critical in rethinking the centrality of ghosts to this last project, and to understanding how time condenses and adheres in the organizing schema and materiality of the spaces of social life and the forms of trans-individual personhood that are those spaces' fourth dimensions. Here in Toro, I have continued to think along these lines, about the embodiment of regional identity through cuisine and the terroir of its wines, cheeses, and garbanzos. Over tapas in the plaza I have been discovering how growing attention to patrimonio connects not only with the current economic crisis (hinging as it does on mortgages and patrimonial property) but with the region's marketing strategies in the EU and the emergent Castilian nationalist movement. Back in New York City during 2010-2011, I aim to sustain this sort of productive interplay between teaching and advising, research and writing, and conversation over food and drink.