Jesús Gutiérrez is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley. His research, teaching and writing cluster around themes related to mediation, performance and embodiment; religion, ritual, and the secular; and temporality, memory and historical consciousness in Black Atlantic societies. His dissertation analyzes the concepts of fugitivity, ancestrality and multiplicity that are activated and disseminated in Afro-Brazilian aesthetic traditions. His ethnographic research suggests that what is at stake in the cultural politics of certain popular and folk art forms of the African Diaspora is not a historicist problematic of nostalgia, national collectivity and collective representation, but rather a much more indeterminate question of how certain traditions serve as technologies that produce concepts and modes of being that straddle heterogeneous domains of historical and cosmological reasoning, and thereby allow for the emergence of unstable, polyvocal subjectivities that bear fraught relationships to the concept of history itself.
Department and Institution:
Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Bio/CV:
