Claire Maass

My research focuses on the dynamic and invariably complex exchange of materials, ideas, and traditions between African American slaves and Spanish colonizers in post contact-period Latin America. I am especially interested in how cross-cultural interactions influenced processes of identity formation amongst slave communities on Jesuit colonial estates. While limited archaeological research has been conducted on Jesuit landholdings and slave societies in Latin America, these projects have overwhelmingly focused on either the social influence of missions in Paraguay and Argentina, or the dialectics of domination and resistance in Caribbean and Brazilian plantations. By treating ideologies of economic exploitation and spiritual sway as isolated phenomena, such studies oversimplify the complex fusion of influences that shaped the everyday experiences of slaves on Jesuit estates. For my dissertation, I plan to draw on post-colonial theory and models of bricolage in order reconstruct a more realistic narrative ofthe social, economic and religious factors that African American slave communities negotiated as they endeavored to express their cultural identity in a new colonial setting.

Before coming to Stanford, I studied Anthropology and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Chicago. While at Chicago, I spent two years working with the Vitor Archaeological Project in the coastal valleys of southern Peru. This experience formed the basis for my undergraduate honors thesis, and has strongly informed my doctoral dissertation research.

 

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