Joanne Rappaport, an anthropologist with a joint appointment in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Georgetown University, received her Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1982. Her interests include: ethnicity, historical anthropology, new social movements, literacy, race, and Andean ethnography and ethnohistory.

Dr. Rappaport has published three books in English: Cumbe Reborn: An Andean Ethnography of History (University of Chicago Press, 1994), Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic Pluralism in Colombia (Duke University Press, 2005), and The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes (Cambridge University Press, 1990; Duke University Press, 1998). Cumbe Reborn and The Politics of Memory explore the nature of the historical memory in northern Andean communities and the relationship between the oral memory and written historical documentation. Intercultural Utopias, the product of collaborative research with indigenous activists from the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca, is a study of indigenous intellectuals and cultural planners in Colombia.

CUMBE REBORN: AN ANDEAN ETHNOGRAPHY OF HISTORY (University of Chicago Press, 1994; ISBN 0-226-70526-9; Spanish translation, Editorial Instituto Colombiano de Antropologia, 2005) According to legend, Cumbe ruled the Colombian community of Cumbal during the Spanish invasion. Although there is no documentation of Cumbe’s existence, today’s Cumbales point to him as their ancestral link to their Pasto ancestors. His image reappears often in popular music, theater, community organization, and militant politics as the Cumbales attempt to reinvigorate their indigenous heritage and reclaim the lands this heritage justifies. This book examines the Cumbales’ reappropriation of history and the resulting reinvention of tradition. It explores the ways in which personal memories are reinterpreted in nonverbal expression, such as ritual and material culture, as well as in oral and written communication. This approach to historical consciousness is grounded in a combination of historical and ethnographic analysis.

INTERCULTURAL UTOPIAS: PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS, CULTURAL EXPERIMENTATION, AND ETHNIC PLURALISM IN COLOMBIA (Duke University Press, 2005; ISBN 0-8223-3599-9) This ethnography, based on a collaborative methodology, explores Colombia's mutifaceted indigenous movement, focusing on its intellectuals: regional indigenous activists, nonindigenous urban collaborators, local teachers, shamans, and native politicians. It interweaves stories of activists with an analysis of the politics of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca, tracing the development of a distinctly indigenous modernity that defies common stereotypes of ethnic separatism or a romantic return to the past. This emerging form of modernity is characterized by interethnic communication and the reframing of selectively appropriated Western research methodologies within indigenous philosophical frameworks.

THE POLITICS OF MEMORY: NATIVE HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION IN THE COLOMBIAN ANDES (Duke University Press, 1998; ISBN 0-8223-1972-1; Spanish translation, Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2000) How does a culture in which writing is not a prominent feature create historical tradition? This book answers this question by tracing the past three centuries of the intellectual history of the Nasa –a community in the Colombian Andes. Focusing on the Nasa historians of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, it highlights the differences between native history and Eurocentric history and demonstrates how these histories must be examined in relation to the particular circumstances in which they were produced. Reconsidering the predominantly mythic status of non-Western historical narrative, the book identifies the political realities that influenced the form and content of Andean history, revealing the distinct historical vision of these stories.

Along with Graciela Bolaños, Abelardo Ramos, and Carlos Miñana, she is the author of ¿Qué pasaría si la escuela . . .? Treinta años de construcción educativa (Popayán: Programa de Educación Bilingüe e Intercultural, Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca, 2004), a history of the Bilingual Intercultural Education Program of the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (CRIC), Colombia's oldest indigenous organization. Based on collaborative research with CRIC activists and published by the organization, this book attempts to narrate CRIC history using conceptual models originating in the organization itself.

She also edited a special issue of the Journal of Latin American Anthropology (vol. 1, no. 2, 1996) entitled Ethnicity Reconfigured: Indigenous Legislators and the Colombian Constitution of 1991, which analyzes the implications for native peoples of the creation of a pluriethnic state in Colombia. Contributing authors include Robert Dover, Les Field, Jean Jackson, Myriam Jimeno, Jocelyn Linnekin, Guillermo Padilla, and Joanne Rappaport.

More recently, she edited a volume, Retornando la mirada: una investigación colaborativa interétnica sobre el Cauca a la entrada del milenio (Popayan: Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2005). The product of collaborative research among U.S. anthropologists, Colombian academics, and indigenous activists, it examines the impact of the indigenous movement on the politics of the southern department of Cauca in the wake of the 1991 Constitution. Contributors include Myriam Amparo Espinosa, David D. Gow, Bettina Ng'weno, Adonias Perdomo, Susana Pinacue, and Joanne Rappaport.

Dr. Rappaport has also published in a variety of scholarly journals, including American Ethnologist, Colonial Latin American Review, History Workshop Journal, Journal of Anthropological Research, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Man, and Revista Colombiana de Antropología, as well as in numerous edited volumes. Her research has been funded by the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars Fulbright Fellowship Program, the Fundacion de Investigaciones Arqueologicas Nationales (Colombia), the Getty Grant Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the U.S. Department of Education Fulbright Program, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, as well as by Georgetown University and by the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center.