Chris Garces
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Ph.D., Princeton University, 2009
ceg97@cornell.edu
607-255-6776
Office: McGraw 262
Areas of Specialization: political anthropology, anthropology of Christianity, humanitarian rhetoric and practice, the critique of saintly ethics, colonial-era monasteries, contemporary prisons, French social thought, Andean Latin America, Western Europe, the United States
Dr. Garces is a political anthropologist with commitments to the historical ethnography of Latin American political theologies and their social reformations across colonial and contemporary worlds. His dissertation, “Whither Charity? Andean Catholic Politics & the Secularization of Sacrifice,” tracked how Catholic charities in Ecuador haltingly incorporated expert medical and labor knowledges into their traditional injunction to care for the poor, telling hidden stories about the non-secular origins of the modern Ecuadorian state. His academic writing has appeared in such journals as Cultural Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, Anthropology & Humanism, Hispanic American Historical Review, Material Religion, and Íconos. He is currently preparing a book-length manuscript on early colonial race relations in Peru and their humanitarian portrayals across Catholic hagiographic and viceroyal administrative literatures.He is also editing a special journal issue dedicated to “Prison Climates in the South”.
Dr. Garces taught for three years at Sarah Lawrence College before moving to Cornell, where during 2009-11 he held a Mellon-funded postdoctoral fellowship. His teaching at Cornell, Sarah Lawrence, CUNY-City College, and Princeton University, has revolved around themes in the metamorphosis of political potentiality, including such course titles as “Sacrifice Now: the politics of life, death, and immortality,” “The Politics of Global Charity,” “Inter-war Anthropologies,” “Explosive Latin America: guns, terror, and everyday violence,” and “Latin American Forms of Colonial Possession.”
Selected Publications
Forthcoming
- "El poder de la pólvora: apuntes sobre la paramilitarización" Urvio: Revista Latinoamericana de la Seguridad Ciudadana, n. 10
2010
- author interview, Cultural Anthropology Online: http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/362
- “The Cross Politics of Ecuador’s Penal State” Cultural Anthropology v. 25 no. 3 (download pdf)
2009
- “Mauss Redux: from warfare’s human toll to l’homme total” (with Alex Jones) Anthropological Quarterly v. 82, n. 1 (download pdf)
2007
- "The Ethical Turn… to Saintliness? an ethnographic provocation” Anthropology and Humanism v. 32, n. 2 (download pdf)
2005
- “Saints and Saintliness” Iberia and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History. ed. Michael J. Francis. New York: ABC-Clio Press (download pdf)
2004
- “Exclusión Constitutiva: las ‘organizaciones pantalla’ y lo anti-social en la renovación urbana de Guayaquil.” ÍCONOS v. 20, August 2004 (the academic journal of FLACSO, Ecuador) (download pdf)