Christopher Krupa

Biography

Chris 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 my work on lynching in Latin America and undergirds my 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.

Research Interest

Violence; state, para-state, state effects; commodities and labour; race politics; speculation; value; historical anthropology