Graduate Student, Anthropology
Thesis Title: What Does it Take to Become a Jew? Conversion, Heritage, and History in Contemporary Spain
|
Ann Stoler
Miriam Ticktin |
About
My current research project centers on religious conversion in contemporary Spain, with an emphasis on the ways in which recent converts to Judaism in Andalucía understand themselves as historical and national subjects. An important question in this work is how Spain's long history of coerced conversion of Jews and Muslims to Christianity is drawn on and refigured in the present by secular/Catholic Spaniards who transform themselves into religious minorities. I am particularly interested in the politics of "cultural heritage" as a theory of history, a driver of tourism economies, and a repertoire of practices through which national belonging and social difference are enacted. I see this project as addressing historically specific questions about the centrality of religious conversion to the formation of the Spanish nation-state and its ongoing relevance to discussions of multiculturalism and modernity. At the same time, I seek a broader conceptual anthropology of conversion that does not treat belief, will, and the subject as a priori categories, but instead asks how these come to be the analytic frames through which we understand social selves.
Broader interests include subject formation, historical anthropology, race and sexuality, political economy, the politics of knowledge, colonialism and imperialism, liberalism and modernity, and "multiculturalism."
