Circulo Andino Events

Friday - Saturday, March 22 & 23, 2013
Rupture and Revival: Four Field Anthropology Graduate Conference
With keynote speaker Marisol de la Cadena. 


Saturday, March 31, 2012
Transforming Landscapes in Andean Societies
This symposium intends to bring professors and community leaders together to share presentations on a variety of subjects related to issues of environmental change in the Andean republics. By hearing perspectives from a range of disciplines, undergraduates and graduate students will be encouraged to consider the linkages between the social and natural sciences in addressing contemporary environmental change.



Saturday, April 2, 2011:
Imagining Ecuador
"Imagining Ecuador" will offer a space for leading scholars to present their most recent work on Ecuador, one of the Andean countries that has experienced significant sociopolitical changes over the last few decades. Our presenters will cover a variety of themes that will engage the audience in thoughtful conversations about change, continuity, and the process of re-envisioning the nation. 

Detailed Program.


March 21-22, 2009:
The 37th Annual Midwest Conference on Andean and Amazonian Archaeology and Ethnohistory
The Midwest Andean Conference hosts scholars studying the ethnography, ethnohistory, and archaeology of the Andean and Amazonian areas. Each year the conference has been sponsored by universities such as the University of Wisconsin (2008), Southern Illinois University (2007), and Vanderbilt University (2006). This event takes place on a weekend - Saturday (morning and afternoon) and Sunday (morning only) - and consists of various 20-minute talks with 10 minutes of question-and-answer at the end of each presentation.
The presentations investigate some aspect of Andean and Amazonian ethnography, ethnohistory, or archaeology. Within this theme, however, there is a wide variety of topics ranging from recent excavations of archaeological sites to analysis of colonial documents. The Midwest Andean Conference is a multidisciplinary event that unites scholars from different research institutions throughout the world.

Detailed Program


Saturday, April 8th, 2006:
Race, Ethnicity and Political Violence (7th - 21st centuries)
The goal of this conference is to understand whether specifically Andean notions of race and ethnicity are related to political violence. How have changes in these notions shaped the character of violence used for political purposes? How, through the ages, have episodes of imperial expansion, armed resistance, domestic violence and other actions changed or reinforced ideas of social classification?

Today in the Andes, the growth of indigenous political movements demonstrates how important issues of ethnic identity, racial discrimination, and violence are in this region. This is not a recent phenomenon. The long existence of complex states which have had to incorporate multiple ethnic groups in this region offers a rich context to study change over time. By inviting scholars to present case studies from various time periods, we hope to have a panoramic view of the changes and continuities in the interrelationships between Andean notions of race and ethnicity and the uses of violence. 

Detailed program 


Thursday, June 23, 2005:
Coloniality and the Erasure of Place: Cultural and Biological Diversity in the Americas
Dr. Tirso Gonzales (Indigenous Resource Center of the Americas, UC-Davis, and Peruvian NGO Atinchik) will speak on “Coloniality and the Erasure of Place: Cultural and Biological Diversity in the Americas”(co-sponsored with the Circulo by Latin American & Caribbean Studies and the Program in American Culture). Tirso Gonzales, Ph.D., is an Indigenous scholar, educator, and activist from Peru, former consultant with the World Bank, researcher and lecturer at UC-Berkeley and UC-Davis, and is knowledgeable in traditional healing and medicinal plants of the Amazon. The Americas encompass a rich spectrum of races and ethnicities. In this region there are as many definitions for “place” as there are cultures – along with their underlying ontologies, epistemologies, and worldviews. Place, as opposed to space, is a specific construction resulting from the interaction between local culture and nature. Space, on the contrary, is associated with colonial and post-colonial globalization (regimes, discourses and practices) and its disregard for place/locality. “Culture seats in places.” For most Indigenous Peoples, place is intrinsically related to land, the countryside, the rural, the forest. In spite of 500 years of colonial and post-colonial domination, the importance of place is central to the production and reproduction of indigenous cultural and biological diversity. This presentation aims to call attention to a process that began with colonization and today has become global: the erasure of place. Identifying the local/regional peculiarities of placelessness, and working towards its reversal, may be accomplished by affirming and/or rethinking place by means of decolonization, thereby inaugurating a process of re-indigenization. Issues such as “indigenous” and “non-indigenous” in relation to land, territory, land tenure patterns, agri-cultures, thus begin to amplify current discussions of these concepts with respect to conventional agriculture and development.


Friday December 3, 2004:
Present and Future of the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement
PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE ECUADORIAN INDIGENOUS MOVEMENT, with LUIS MACAS, Founder of Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador and First indigenous Minister of Agriculture of Ecuador, and MARISOL DE LA CADENA, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, UC Davis, Author of "Indigenous Mestizos" (Duke University Press, 2000). Circulo Cosponsored Event made possible with gratefully acknowledged support from the International Institute, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and the Department of Anthropology, and the Office of the Provost for Academic Affairs.

December 1-4, 2004 - The Visit of Dr. Luis Macas to the University of Michigan



Friday, November 5, 2004:
Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Attorney Julissa Mantilla and sociologist Félix Reategui will converse in Spanish with anthropology pre-candidate Nathalie Koc Menard about their work on Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Julissa Mantilla is a Peruvian lawyer with a Master’s Degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science of the University of London. She is also a Professor of International Human Rights at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru. She worked at the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PTRC). In the PTRC, she was in charge of the cases of sexual violence against women; in addition, she had the responsibility of incorporating the gender perspective at the whole PTRC. Currently, she is a Fulbright New Century Scholar and she is working in a research on Gender Perspective on Truth Commissions based at the Washington College of Law of the American University. Félix Reátegui is a sociologist at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (Lima), where he is coordinator of the Research Unit of the Instituto de Democracia y Derechos Humanos and Professor of Development Theories and Policies and of Violence, Democracy and Human Rights. He served on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission appointed in Perú in 2001 to investigate the violence process between 1980 and 2000. He was assistant to the TRC’s Chairman and chief of the Final Report Unit. Since the closing of the TRC-Perú, Félix Reátegui served as a consultant to the ICTJ (New York) on topics related to TRCs and Transitional Justice Training in Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka.


Friday, October 8, 2004:
Ritual Syncretism Among High-Altitude Herders
Xavier Ricard , the director of Revista Andina and of the Colegio Andino del Centro "Bartolomé de Las Casas", in Cuzco, Perú, gives a talk in Spanish on ritual syncretism among high-altitude herders. He spoke about beliefs and ritual practices of alpaca herders in the Ausangate region, focusing on the coherence of their representational system. He also reconsidered a long-standing anthropological debaet about rationality of magical beliefs, based on his thesis. He concluded that a religious syncretic discourse does not exist; rather, what exist are exclusive interpretive paradigms that give rise, under particular circumstances, to transitional discourses. More information about Revista Andina can be found here



Friday, April 9, 2004:
El Feto Agresivo. Parto, formación de la persona y mito-historia en los Andes
Tristan Platt, Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews, UK, spoke on "El Feto Agresivo. Parto, formación de la persona y mito-historia en los Andes".


Friday, March 19, 2004:
The Production of Other Knowledges and its Tensions: From Andeanist Anthropology to Interculturalidad?
Anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena spoke on "The Production of Other Knowledges and its Tensions: From Andeanist Anthropology to Interculturalidad?" Discussants Guillermo Salas (graduate student, Anthropology) and Fernando Velasquez (graduate student, Romance Languages and Literatures) will comment. (The Circulo gratefully thanks our co-sponsors for this event, LACS and the Departments of Anthropology and Romance Languages and Literatures!)


Friday, March 19, 2004:
Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco Peru
Anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena discussed her 2000 book "Indigenous Mestizos" in a book-group format.