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Marisol de la Cadena Marisol de la Cadena was born in Lima, Peru, where she grew up. She finished her undergraduate degree in anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in 1980. She then studied at and received a master of arts in anthropology at the University of Durham in England in 1982, and a diplôme d’etudes approfondies, or master of advanced studies, from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She came to the United States in 1988 to study at the University of Wisconsin (Ph.D., 1995) and accepted an appointment as assistant professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1996; nevertheless, Ms. de la Cadena continues to have close ties to the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos as well as to the Centro Bartolome de Las Casas in Cuzco, where she has been a research associate since 2001.

Career
De la Cadena is known for her work as both an activist and an anthropologist. She has remarked of her time as a student as highly political, and describes her early fieldwork as both anthropology and activism. As a student-activist she was involved in Peruvian peasant movements and was deeply perturbed by the Peruvian left’s desire to assimilate peasants into a Western standard rather than raise up indigenous ways of being (Taguchi). Throughout her career she has worked most actively with indigenous communities in the Andes where she researches such issues as agrarian reform and indigenous political agency. De la Cadena is also known for her push to decolonize indigenous spaces. In 2000 her first major publication was released, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1910-1991, a historical and ethnographic analysis of race relations in the Andes. From 2005 to 2007 de la Cadena worked as the director of its Center for History, Society, and Culture, after working there for some time and continuing to work there as a professor to this day. In 2008 de la Cadena was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences, Latin America & Caribbean for her outstanding scholarship. In 2015 she released her second major publication, Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds; it is based on conversations with two Quechua speaking men that lived in Cuzco, Peru. De la Cadena describes the book as, “an ethnography concerned with the concreteness of incommensurability and the eventfulness of the ahistorical”. De la Cadena also collaborates closely with a number of other universities. Every year she returns to Peru to advise students and to participate in seminars and workshops with colleagues; she is also affiliated with the University of Popayán in Colombia and a participant in GEAPRONA (Grupo de Estudios de Aboriginalidad, Provincias y Nación) in Buenos Aires. Ms. de la Cadena has also been a visiting professor at the Universidad de Barcelona (2004) (John Simon Guggenheim Foundation).

Research Focus
De la Cadena is interested in the study of politics, multispecies, indigeneity, history, and the anthropologies of worlds. The focus of her studies are in Latin America, specifically Columbia and Peru. In these areas she is most concerned with the relationship between concepts and methods and interfaces as analytical sites. She is interested in ethnographic concepts of those that blur the distinction between theory and empirical. Her current field of study are cattle ranches and veterinary schools in columbia.

Future Projects

As of 2019, her current research project is called “Learning Cow”. She conducted the research in collaboration with Santiago Martinez who is both an anthropologist and a physician from Colombia. “Learning Cow” is a conceptual metaphor, and an ethnographic concept which they want to achieve several things. They plan to focus on the practice of pastoralism in Columbia. “Learning Cow” also alludes to the anthropological requirement of learning the spoken language of the field site. This is important because In Columbia there is a vast and heterogeneous human language related to the practices of the life of cows and their deaths.

Activism
In interviews conducted between December 2016 to February 2017 by Yoku Taguchi with Marisol de la Cadena she admits that her fieldwork practice as an undergraduate student in Peru was a combination of anthropology and activism. There were almost no students at the university who were not involved in politics. As student-activists they were involved in ‘peasant movements’ which include large, nation-wide meetings convened by the many ‘peasant federations’ in the country. She describes experiencing intellectual anxiety because leftist politics were as modernizing as their right-wing counterparts. With the left-wing she was supposed to think that the peasants were backwards which contradicted the equality that they were preaching as activists. She took responsibility to teach the activists that they were being racist. They wanted to change the world for the better, but they had a historicist evolutionary hierarchy in their minds - “we should all be modern! It was a modern left, sharing with the right what Anibal Quijano (2000) called the ‘coloniality of power’ (Interview). Their task as revolutionaries was to change them into modern subjects, individuals with class consciousness-a term that was synonymous with something like a structurally situated historical consciousness. One transformed into historical subjects, ‘peasants’ would realize that what they called their ‘myths’ were only stories. Modern history would then replace mythological as their cosmology-they would become subjects of the nation-state, and they would all be equal. However, De la Cadena admits that she found it difficult to embody that script. If she had not been a fieldworker it would have been easier because the script implied the implementation of a hierarchy. It implied the superiority of her historical consciousness.

Published works
Books Articles and Chapters
 * de la Cadena, M. (2007) Indigenous Experience Today (edited volume with Orin Starn). London: Berg Publishers.
 * de la Cadena, M. (2008) Formaciones de Indigeneidad. Articulaciones Raciales, Mestizaje y Nación en America Latina (edited volume). Bogotá: Envión Eds.
 * de la Cadena, M. (2011) Cultures of Race and Hybridity in Latin America (SEPHIS-CSSSC, Netherlands, Calcutta)
 * de la Cadena, M. (2012) Cosmopolitiques dans les Andes et en Amazonie: Comment l’Autochtone politique influence-t-il la Politique? with Jorge Legoas, special issue of Recherches Amérindiennes au Quebec Vol XII (2-3)
 * de la Cadena, M. (2015) Earth-Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds(Morgan Lectures Series-Duke University Press)
 * 2017 “The Uncommons” editor with Mario Blaser. Special issue of Anthropologica. Journal of the Canadian Anthropological Society. 59:2
 * 2018 A World of Many Worlds with Mario Blaser ed. vol. Duke University Press
 * de la Cadena M (2010) Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond Politics Beyond Politics as Usual. Cultural Anthropology 25 (2)
 * de la Cadena, M. (2012) Cosmopolitics: How does indigenous politics affect politics? Introduction to Cosmopolitiques dans les Andes et en Amazonie: Comment l’Autochtone politique influence-t-il la Politique? with Jorge Legoas, in Recherches Amérindiennes au Quebec Vol XII (2-3)
 * de la Cadena, M. (2014) The politics of modern politics meets ethnographies of excess through ontological openings. In Fieldsights – Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology online, http://culanth.org/fieldsights/471
 * de la Cadena, M. (2014) Runa: Human but not only in HAU. Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Vol 4 No 2
 * de la Cadena, M. (2015) Interfaces as ethnographic site that is also method in anthropology and STS. Generative Interfaces. HAU. Journal of Ethnographic Theory Vol 5 No 1
 * de la Cadena, M., & Lien, M. (2015) Anthropology and STS. Generative Interfaces. in HAU. Journal of Ethnographic Theory Vol 5 No 1
 * de la Cadena, M. (2015) “Uncommoning nature” in e-flux August 2015
 * 2018 Uncommoning Nature: stories from the Anthropo-not-seen. In Penelope Harvey et. al. Anthropos and the Material Duke University Press
 * 2018 Sacred Mountains. Indigenous Religion and not Only. In World Multiple, Atsuro Morita et.al. editors Routledge.

Honors and Awards

 * 2007-8 American Philosophical Society-Research Fellowship
 * 2008-9 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation-Research Fellowship
 * 2008-9 Wenner-Gren Foundation, Research Grant
 * 2009-10 Wenner Gren Fo. Conference Support Grant (with Mario Blaser and Arturo Escobar)
 * 2012-16 John E. Sawyer Mellon-Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures
 * 2015 ‘Flora Tristán’ Best Book Award Latin American Studies Association LASA
 * 2018 Distinguished Graduate and Post-Doctoral Mentoring Award---UC Davis
 * 2018 Senior Book Prize from the Association for Feminist Anthropology—American Anthropological Association