DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS

Linguistic anthropology, cultural Anthropology, urban studies, racialization, migration, chronotopes, sociophonetics, morphosyntax, semiotics of race, Indigenous diasporas, the Andean region, South America, Latin America, Spain, Indigeneity, queer theory.

BIOGRAPHY

Diego Arispe-Bazán is a linguistic and cultural anthropologist; his research centers on the reproduction of coloniality and potential decolonial projects in South America, specifically in the Andes. His ethnographic and semiotic research follows a fine-grained approach to understanding the composition of categories of race and class in Latin America as intertwined colonial processes. He received his Ph.D in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018.  He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, affiliated with the Departments of Spanish & Portuguese and Anthropology. His research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and his teaching has been recognized by NAFSA: The Association of International Educators. 

His book project moves between Lima, Peru and Madrid, Spain, and investigates how migration is impacted by shifts in the global economic system. The book follows a few of the twenty thousand Spanish citizens who migrated to Peru after the 2008 Spanish economic crisis. Their incursion into upwardly mobile, middle class spaces in Lima triggered competition not only over jobs, but over the legacy of Spanish colonization and, by extension, the meaning of history itself. Migrants’ successful entry into Peruvian labor markets generated conflict with the local middle class, whose mestizo members consistently reinforce colonial racial and class hierarchies. Middle-class Peruvians therefore decry the colonial enterprise as oppressive while actively participating in it. Thus, coloniality comes to be animated by migrants and upwardly-mobile locals alike through phonemic, grammatical, and discursive strategies. 

His most recent research follows alternatives to development based on Indigenous economics, Indigenous philosophy, and discourses of community.

AWARDS

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE

Bi-Annual Thinking Andean Studies Conference

https://thinkingandeanstudies.com/