Description:

Presentation by Professor Carlota McAllister

"This is how my conciencia was born: Jesuits, Maya, and a church from below in revolutionary Guatemala"

Carlota McAllister is associate professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University in Toronto, Canada. A political and historical anthropologist, she studies the formation of political and moral agency in situations of conflict or crisis in agrarian communities in Guatemala and Chile. She co-edited War by Other Means: Aftermath in Postgenocide Guatemala (Duke UP, 2013) with Diane Nelson, a special issue of Social Analysis on “Theopolitics in/of the Americas,” with Valentina Napolitano, and a special issue of American Religion on “Subversive Religions and More-than-human Materialities” with Ana Mariella Bacigalupo and Carlos Manrique. Her monograph The Good Road: Words, the Word, and the World in Revolutionary Guatemala is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Her current project builds on a long-term study of the HidroAysén dam conflict in Chilean Patagonia to explore what it would mean for our concepts of the political if we took rivers rather than states as the sovereigns of the territories through which they run.