Christopher Krupa

Associate Professor
HL 326 (UTSC), 209 (St. George)
(416) 208-2893

Campus

Fields of Study

Areas of Interest

Research Keywords: Violence; Racial Capitalism; (Post)coloniality; State and Para-State Complexes; Political Affect and Embodiment; Plantation Systems; Labour, Debt and Finance; Critical Race Theory; History and Historicity; Primitive Accumulation

Research Region: Latin America, Ecuador

Biography

Christopher Krupa is a political anthropologist broadly interested in struggles over the production and circulation of political matter—the processes by which objects and categories ghost the relations of their making and take on political and social force. He has pursued this interest through his 15-plus years of ethnographic research in Andean Ecuador, focusing on issues of state formation, violence, and labour relations in agro-export enclaves encroaching upon indigenous territories. His work on the state is rooted in political phenomenology. It asks how the state comes to appear as a tangible, material, and consequential force among the governed and about the emergence of para-state complexes in places where the state’s monopoly on rule is not guaranteed. He has also sought to understand the role of emotion in generating bonds between citizen and state, the material technologies of state credibility, and the genres by which the state represents itself and is narrated into being. His studies of violence have focused on its political-semiotic aspects, particularly the ways that meaning is produced around the victim or the corpse. This approach directed his work on lynching in Latin America and undergirds his studies of Ecuador’s recent truth commission. He is also writing an intimate biography of guerrilla activity in 1980s Ecuador and its place in current reimaginings of this country’s cold war history. His work on labour reflects his long-term interest in the expansion of agrarian export production zones in the Global South and the social and political lives of populations laboring in them. His ongoing analysis of Ecuador’s cut-flower sector examines labour as a speculative technology of managing both a potentially antagonistic indigenous workforce and the wild fluctuations of an uncertain global commodity market.

Education

Ph.D. (University of California, Davis)

Publications

Books

2022. A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador. University of Pennsylvania Press. Winner of the 2020-2022 Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA) Book Prize. Winner of the 2023 Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (SLACA) Book Prize.

“On the Dialectics of Capitalist Expansion”: extended interview by Stephen Campbell about A Feast of Flowers

“A Feast of Flowers Book Symposium” (Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 97: 117-129) with Gavin Smith, Stephen Striffler, Paul Eiss, Victor Bretón Solo de Zaldívar, and Christopher Krupa

2015. State Theory and Andean Politics: New Approaches to the Study of Rule (co-edited with David Nugent). University of Pennsylvania Press.

Article on the book in UTSC Commons

Special Issues

2019 “The Counter-Politics of Intellectuals: Three Interventions”. Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 84 (July).

2015      Guest Editor (with Mercedes Prieto) of “Ensayos sobre el estado en América Latina,” a Special Issue of Íconos: Revista de Ciencias Sociales No. 52.

2012. Guest Editor (with Gavin Smith) of a Special Forum on “Spaces of Exception: The Administration of Populations in the North and the South”. In Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 64: 84-128. (with contributions from Andrés Guerrero, Tristan Platt, Mark Thurner, João Biehl and Sebastian Ramirez Hernandez)

Articles and Book Chapters

2024 “Anthropologists are Talking—About Contemporary Plantations. Technologies, Violence, and Vulnerability”. With Sophie Chao and Tania Murray Li. Ethnos, forthcoming.

2024 “Afterword: Reflections on Value, Objectivity, and Death”. In Insidious Capital: Frontlines of Value at the End of a Global Cycle, Don Kalb, ed. Berghahn: 303-316.

2019 “The Politics of Intellectual Labor under Contemporary Capitalist Restructuring”. In Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 84 (July).

2015      (with Mercedes Prieto) “Corpus Mysticum estatal o ¿cómo podemos pensar el estado en América Latina hoy?” In Íconos: Revista de Ciencias Sociales Num. 52, Quito, mayo 2015, pp. 11-17.

2015 (with David Nugent) “Off-Centered States: Re-thinking State Theory through an Andean Lens.” In State Theory and Andean Politics: New Approaches to the Study of Rule. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp 1-31.

2015      “Cadastral Politics: Property Wars and State Realism in Highland Ecuador”. In State Theory and Andean Politics: New Approaches to the Study of Rule. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp 99- 125.

2013. “Neoliberal Reckoning: Ecuador’s Truth Commission and the Mythopoetics of Political Violence.” In Neoliberalism, Interrupted: Social Change and Contested Governance in Contemporary Latin America, Mark Goodale and Nancy Grey Postero, eds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 169-194.

2012. “Ghostly Figures outside the Domain of Political Economy: Class Analysis and the Invisiblized Livelihoods of an Andean Export Zone.” In Confronting Capital: Critique and Engagement in Anthropology, Belinda Leach, Pauline Barber, and Winnie Lem, eds. New York: Routledge: 187-207.

2012. “Unfolding the Crease in Liberal Republican Citizenship: An Introduction to the Postcolonial Critique of Andrés Guerrero” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 63: 85-89.

2011. “Mestizo Mainstream: Reaffirmations of Natural Citizenship in Ecuador.” In Subalternity and Difference: Investigations from the North and the South (Gyanendra Pandey, ed.). New York: Routledge: 149-166.

2010. “State by Proxy: Privatized Government in the Andes.” Comparative Studies in Society and History (52: 2): 319-350.

2009. “Histories in Red: Ways of Seeing Lynching in Ecuador.” American Ethnologist (36: 1): 20-39.

2006. Invited Commentary on Susana Narotzky “The Project in the Model: Reciprocity, Social Capital and the Politics of Ethnographic Realism.” (Special Forum on Anthropological Theory) Current Anthropology (48: 3): 416-417.

Reviews

2022. Review of The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia (Teo Ballvé), American Anthropologist 124(1): 222-223

2013. Review of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Rob Nixon). Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4: 177-179.

2005. Review of Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (Bertell Ollman). Anthropologica (47:2): 310-311.

Graduate Students

Administrative Service

Councilor, American Ethnological Society
Co-Editor, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology