Kay B. Warren’s research while affiliated with Brown University and other places

This article explores Begoña Aretxaga's research on women, nationalism and political subjectivity in Northern Ireland during `the troubles' by considering her writings as a field worker as they bear on her work as an ethnographer and theoretical innovator. My goal is to illustrate the knowledge production and representational strategies integral to Aretxaga's analysis of violence, state power, and politicized ethnic minorities in European democracies. The article centers on correspondence between Aretxaga and a republican woman prisoner that evolved into a dialogue about coming of age in situations of state repression and counternationalist resistance. This analysis also considers the ways that women built their own cultural and social worlds in prison as a counterpoint to the changing techniques of prison control from 1971 through the early 1990s.

This review examines literature on indigenous movements in Latin America from 1992 to 2004. It addresses ethnic identity and ethnic activism, in particular the reindianization processes occurring in indigenous communities throughout the region. We explore the impact that states and indigenous mobilizing efforts have had on each other, as well as the role of transnational nongovernmental organizations and para-statal organizations, neoliberalism more broadly, and armed conflict. Shifts in ethnoracial, political, and cultural indigenous discourses are examined, special attention being paid to new deployments of rhetorics concerned with political imaginaries, customary law, culture, and identity. Self-representational strategies will be numerous and dynamic, identities themselves multiple, fluid, and abundantly positional. The challenges these dynamics present for anthropological field research and ethnographic writing are discussed, as is the dialogue between scholars, indigenous and not, and activi...

June Nash’s work spans 50 years of anthropology and reflects important transformations in geopolitics, economic globalization, anthropological theory, and the people and societies we study. Nash’s creativity reveals itself as inherently oppositional, even when she has written within major research paradigms. I argue that if we use the concept of ‘repositioning’ to examine the life work of an anthropologist, the notion of stable schools, paradigms and languages of analysis falls away to reveal a much more dynamic picture of anthropological practice. Based on interviews in 2002, this article examines the ways in which Nash has geographically and institutionally repositioned her ethnographic studies as an engaged anthropologist. It traces the ways her intellectual agenda and commitment to social justice have informed her research and ethnographic writing. The article is concerned with the living dimension of ethnographic knowledge, with Nash’s fashioning of oral narratives that remember and reconsider her earlier fieldwork - as her published texts inevitably become historical artifacts. In the process, the article poses the question: how can we make ethnographic writing a more dynamic way of representing the human cost of the currents of change we seek to understand?

Throughout Latin America, indigenous peoples are responding to state violence and pro-democracy social movements by asserting their rights to a greater measure of cultural autonomy and self-determination. This volume's rich case studies of movements in Colombia, Guatemala, and Brazil weigh the degree of success achieved by indigenous leaders in influencing national agendas when governments display highly ambivalent attitudes about strengthening ethnic diversity. The contributors to this volume are leading anthropologists and indigenous activists from the United States and Latin America. They address the double binds of indigenous organizing and "working within the system" as well as the flexibility of political tactics used to achieve cultural goals outside the scope of state politics. The contributors answer questions about who speaks for indigenous communities, how indigenous movements relate to the popular left, and how conflicts between the national indigenous leadership and local communities play out in specific cultural and political contexts. The volume sheds new light on the realities of asymmetrical power relations and on the ways in which indigenous communities and their representatives employ Western constructions of subjectivity, alterity, and authentic versus counterfeit identity, as well as how they manipulate bureaucratic structures, international organizations, and the mass media to advance goals that involve distinctive visions of an indigenous future.