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Fernando Armstrong-Fumero is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in research in political anthropology, oral history and multiculturalism in Mexico and Latin America. He also has a long-term research project on the intellectual history of anthropology in the Americas.
He earned a Ph.D. in 2007 from Stanford University. His doctoral research focused on how tension between community-based solidarities and family-based factionalism are a common thread that links local experiences of the different political regimes of agrarianism and multiculturalism in Mexico.
Armstrong-Fumero is currently developing two long-term projects. One is based on collaborative, community-based research on the role of oral narrative and traditional knowledge of the lived landscape in promoting the participation of local communities in cultural heritage practice; the other involves the intellectual history of anthropology in the Americas and the complicated relationship between academic theories of cultural and biological history and the emphasis on common sense and self-evident facts that have broad currency in American culture.
At Smith, Armstrong-Fumero teaches courses in political anthropology and Mesoamerican studies, as well as a general course on the history of anthropological theory.
Armstrong-Fumero's most recent book is Elusive Unity: Factionalism and the Limits of Identity Politics in Yucatan, Mexico, University Press of Colorado, 2013. He was the editor and translator, and wrote the introduction to, Forjando Patria: Pro-Nacionalismo, written by Manuel Gamio, University Press of Colorado, 2010. Armstrong-Fumero has also written numerous articles and book chapters.
Articles currently in press include:
"A Tale of Two Mayan Babels: Vernacular Histories of the Maya and the Limits of Inclusion," Ethnohistory.
"I Have Not Advanced a Single Theory: Mayan Ruins, Popular Culture and Academic Authority in Nineteenth Century America," Histories of Anthropology Annual.
"Even the Most Careless Observer: Race, Visual Discernment in Physical Anthropology from Samuel Morton to Kennewick Man," American Studies 53:2.