Peter Gose

Biography

Gose was raised in Vancouver and did his BA in Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (1979) then moved to the London School of Economics to do his MSc (1980) and PhD (1986) in Social Anthropology. He began his research career as an ethnographer of the Peruvian Andes, exploring how peasant mortuary and sacrificial rituals articulate relations of production, property and political power. In the late 1980s, he turned to historical research on ritual and political power under the Incas. Since 1993, he has done extensive archival research on Spanish colonialism in the Andes and its “extirpation of idolatry” campaigns, which resulted in a recent book on the inter-cultural politics of ancestor worship. Before coming to Carleton as Chair of Sociology and Anthropology, his previous appointments were at the University of Lethbridge (1987-1994) and the University of Regina (1994-2005).

Research Interest

With the help of an SSHRC Standard Research Grant (2009-2012), he is now investigating the peculiarities of “purity of blood” as an early modern Spanish racism, both in the Iberian peninsula and South America. This research addresses relations between racism, honour and nobility, racializing displacements of class and gender tensions, and the interaction between nationalism and colonialism in the historical development of this particular racism. He also maintains long-standing interests in hermeneutics, practice theory, and hegemony theory. At Carleton, he has taught a fourth year undergraduate seminar in Varieties of Practice Theory (ANTH 4215) and graduate courses in Theory and Methods in Anthropology (ANTH 5402), Signs and Symbols (ANTH 5403), Research Design (ANTH 5812), and the Doctoral Seminar in Anthropology (ANTH 6000). Among his teaching interests are Colonialism and Post-Colonialism, Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism, the Anthropology of Ritual, Symbolic Anthropology, Social Organization, Economic Anthropology, Ethnographic Fieldwork, Andean Ethnography and Andean Ethnohistory.