ANDREW ORTA
Associate Professor

I am a sociocultural anthropologist with a research specialization in highlands Bolivia, where I have been conducting ethnographic field research since 1989. My research and teaching interests include: colonial and post-colonial societies; locality; ethnicity and nationalism; religion and missionization; embodiment and personhood; the history of anthropological theory and practice and the history of area studies. A central theme in my work has been the cultural politics of locality in postcolonial, global and neoliberal contexts.

My primary research to date has been focused on contemporary interactions between Catholic missionaries and Aymara-speakers of the altiplano region. My book, Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara and the “New Evangelization” (Columbia University Press, 2004) examines missionaries, indigenous catechists and Aymara communities focusing on the region of Jesús de Machaqa (Ingavi Province, Department of La Paz). The point of departure for the project is a pastoral ideology known as the theology of inculturation, by which missionaries seek to embrace apparently indigenous ritual practices and beliefs as local expressions of universal Christian meanings. In some cases, missionaries are in the awkward position of encouraging Aymara to celebrate the very ritual practices that they or their predecessors effectively eradicated. Some five centuries after their arrival in the New World to spread the Christian message at the expense of indigenous cultures, foreign Catholic missionaries at the turn of the millennium find themselves teaching the Aymara their own culture.

I am currently embarked upon two new research projects. One continues my research engagement with Bolivia examining shifting relations between indigenous locality and the nation-state over key moments from the early moments of independence in the 19th century through current processes of political and economic decentralization. Another project is focused on the training of international business practitioners at international business programs in the United States.

EDUCATION:

B.A. 1985, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut; Anthropology (High Honors), Religious Studies. .

M.A. 1990, University of Chicago; Anthropology.

Ph.D. 1996, University of Chicago; Anthropology.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

Books:

2004

Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara and the “New Evangelization” New York: Columbia University Press.

Articles and Book Chapters:

2004	The promise of particularism and the theology of culture: the limits and lessons of “neo-Boasianism” American Anthropologist 106(3):473-487.
[2003]	“Ethnography: South America : Highlands” Handbook of Latin American Studies Volume 61 (forthcoming).
2002	Burying the past: locality, lived history and death in an Aymara ritual of remembrance. Cultural Anthropology 17(4):471-511.
2002	“Living the past in another way:” reciprocal conversions in missionary-Aymara interactions. Anthropological Quarterly 75(4):707-743.
2001	Remembering the ayllu, remaking the nation: Indigenous scholarship and activism in the Bolivian Andes Journal of Latin American Anthropology 6(1): 198-201.
2000	Syncretic subjects and body politics: doubleness, personhood, and Aymara catechists. American Ethnologist 26(4):864-889.
1998	Converting difference: missionaries, metaculture and the politics of locality. Ethnology 37(2):165-185.
1995	From theologies of liberation to theologies of inculturation: Aymara catechists and the second evangelization in highlands Bolivia. In Organized religion in the political transformation of Latin America, edited by Satya R. Pattnayak, pp. 97-124. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America.