Dr Alanna Cant, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School, has recently published an article entitled What Can Witchcraft Do in Mexico? for Anthropology News.
In it, she argues that, although it rarely results in accusations, violence or exclusion, witchcraft has implications for power and authority in Mexican Catholicism and uses examples from her field research in Oaxaca to illustrate this.
The study builds on the central theme of Dr Cant’s research, that of people’s ‘everyday aesthetic practices’ in Oaxaca, Mexico and how these practices intersect with larger issues of politics, value, globalisation, identity, history and faith. Alanna draws in particular on works by Pierre Bourdieu, Walter Benjamin and Alfred Gell to develop a robust anthropological approach to aesthetics that attends to the material, artistic and auratic power of art-like objects, while also addressing the social relationships constituted through aesthetic practices and experiences. She is also interested in the methodological issues of studying aesthetics and art production ethnographically.
Her book, The Value of Aesthetics: Oaxacan Woodcarvers in Global Economies of Culture, will be published in 2019.
The full article can be read here.