“Style Matters: Ethnography as Method and Genre,”Anthropology and Humanism, v.32, n.2, 2007. Download article.

In this special issue of Anthropology and Humanism, I bring together five anthropologists to tackle the issue of style in contemporary ethnography. Essays by Edith Turner, Kirin Narayan, Ruth Behar, Jeanne Simonelli, Paul Stoller and myself speak to the need for deeper committment to good writing in the discipline. My article examines the potential for narrative style to reposition experience as central to the anthropological project. Drawing on the insights of experimental ethnography and pragmatist philosophy, the article critiques this dichotomy, arguing for the methodological importance of narrative style in ethnographic writing both as an evocation of fieldwork experience and as an act of authentic political engagement.

“Re/Making La Negrita: Culture as an Aesthetic System in Costa Rica,”American Anthropologist, v.108, n.4, 2006. Download article.

In this article, I examine the production of meaning in the veneration of La Negrita, the black Madonna and patroness of Costa Rica. Both an apparition and an icon, La Negrita is a 20-centimeter, dark-colored statue of the Virgin Mary that appeared to a mulata girl on the outskirts of the colonial city of Cartago in 1635. Throughout the ensuing 400 years, La Negrita has been remade in the image of hegemony, even as the experience of her perceived power has challenged that ideological and coercive project. Through an analysis of this historical progression, I argue for a theory of culture as an aesthetic system, where the egalitarianism of experience is always in conflict with the authoritarianism of meaning.

“Red, White and Black: Communist Literature and Black Migrant Labor in Costa Rica,” Afro-Hispanic Review, v.24, n.2, 2005.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the work of novelists Carlos Luis Fallas and Joaquin Gutiérrez helped the Communist Party of Costa Rica to successfully appropriate an image of blackness as a powerful force for social change, while perpetuating the denigration of blackness’ embodiment in the very workers they claimed to support. This article explores this curious paradox through the histories of black migrant labor and the Communist Party in Costa Rica. Focusing on the watershed event of the banana strike of 1934, the article traces the literary appropriation of blackness in the work of communist writers. Ultimately, the role of blackness in Costa Rican communist literature reflects a particular failing of the Communist International in the first half of the 20th century, that is, the implicit imperialism of ideology that relegated the colonized “Other” to the margins of their own struggle.

“The Invention of Fine Art: Creating a Cultural Elite in a Marginal Community,” Journal of Visual Anthropology, v.17, n.3-4, 2004. Download article.

In Puerto Limón, Costa Rica, a small group of artists have established and maintain an aesthetic hierarchy, which distinguishes art from craft, artists from artisans, men from women, elite from philistine. Canvas art is part of a cycle of aesthetic invention, where Limonenses appropriate external resources to fit certain paradigms of legitimacy and permanence. This article explores the arbitrary nature of ‘‘fine art’’ as a category of aesthetic practice, and how the creation of a cultural elite legitimates the production and consumption of art objects.

“Duke vs. Tito: Aesthetic Conflict in East Harlem, New York,” Visual Anthropology Review, v. 18, n.1-2, 2002. Download article.

In East Harlem, also known as El Barrio or Spanish Harlem, controversy around the Duke Ellington memorial and “Tito Puente Way” is part of an ongoing conflict between African-Americans and Puerto Ricans. This article argues that culture is the product of an aesthetic system rooted in collective experience. Divergent aesthetic systems, such as those of particular ethnic groups, can often conflict in the public space of a diverse urban community as values overlap and compete for dominance in an increasingly alienating environment. Using the above example, along with other sites of conflicting aesthetics between Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Italians and Haitians in East Harlem, the paper argues that aesthetic systems do not merely express deeper ethnic cleavages, but are themselves sources of conflict. The paper also demonstrates that ethnic conflict need not be violent, even in a stereotypically violent community, but can be mediated by competing aesthetic systems through various, usually public, expressive forms.

“Gauguin, Negrín and the Art of Anthropology,” Visual Anthropology Review, v.17, n.1, 2001. Download article.

In this article I compare the life and work of Paul Gauguin to Negrín, a local artist in Puerto Limón, Costa Rica, and to my own work as an anthropologist. The article raises the issues of primitivism, the commodification of primitivism, the false tension between Western artistic elitism and non-Western craft sensibility, and finally the ethnographer as traveling impressionist. Gauguin, like Negrín, like myself, were trying to “rescue culture,” that is, actively and intentionally re-creating bits of salient experience in the artistry of a word or a brush stroke. We were all also conceiving culture as something we both create and are created by. But this presupposes a consensus on what we mean by culture, art and “meaning” itself. I argue for a conceptual re-figuring of culture, aesthetics, art and meaning, born out of the challenge of local context in the pursuit of an anthropology of art. The specter of Gauguin’s art as ethnography runs throughout, questioning more specifically the role of ethnography as art itself.

“The Caribbean Carretera: Race, Space and Social Liminality in Costa Rica,” The Bulletin of Latin American Research, v.20, n.1, 2001. Download article.

A single highway connects the Caribbean province of Limón to mainstream society in the highlands of Costa Rica. This paper explores the ways in which that highway affects the status hierarchy of mainstream society in Costa Rica, and how the construction of whiteness as an unexamined racial qualifier for total social incorporation constrains the perception of blacks as social liminars and blackness as a state of communitas. The argument elaborates the work of Victor Turner on ritual liminality to suggest the structural ambiguity of Afro-Latin Americans in the context of Costa Rica.

“Poetic Power: The Gendering of Literary Style in Puerto Limón,” Afro-Hispanic Review, v.19, n.2, 2000.

For much of the relatively short history of prose literature in Puerto Limón, Costa Rica, the form has been dominated not only by men, but by white Costa Rican men. Two of the three most famous white Costa Rican authors to write about Limón, Joaquín Gutiérrez and Abel Pacheco, were actually born in the province. Carlos Luis Fallas was born in Alajuela, a highland province, but spent some years working the banana plantations of Limón. As insiders and outsiders, white men are writing the bulk of Limonense narrative, which would indicate a link between perceived socio-political power and the prose narrative form in literature. This article explores some of the reasons behind this gender distinction, and analyzes the literary products of women to understand more clearly how poetry is connected to the process of identity formation and the particular aesthetic of literary production in Limón.

“Carnaval in Costa Rica: Ideology and Phenomenological Experience in Puerto Limón,” Wadabagei: A Journal of the Caribbean and its Diaspora, v.1, n.2, 1998.

This paper examines the role of ideology and phenomenological experience in the forging of identity in the Caribbean Diaspora of Puerto Limón, Costa Rica. It explores the development of an ideology of identity based on a concept of “blackness,” or Negritud, and how Limonenses place that ideology into cultural practice through the aesthetics of Carnaval. It also explores how Limonenses transform Limón Carnaval, as a non-native, ideologically appropriated expressive form, into an organic expression of identity through street bands known as comparsas, thus leaving behind its ideological underpinnings for a phenomenological understanding of Limonense lived experience. This paper also considers the double role of aesthetics in this process: both as a legitimating apparatus for a conceptual ideology; and as the forum in which phenomenological experience may undermine that same ideology.