Master of Arts Program in Conflict Resolution

Joanne Rappaport, an anthropologist with a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese 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 single-authored 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.

A fourth book co-authored with art historian Tom Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes, was published in 2012 by Duke University Press; it explores the ways in which European literate conventions (both in terms of alphabetic writing and narrative pictorial representation) impacted the nature of native memory in the northern Andes of what is today Colombia and Ecuador.

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 is currently completing a book on racial mixing in 16th-17th century Bogota, with the tentative title, The Disappearing Mestizo.

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.

She also 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.

Most recently, in collaboration with Les Field of the University of New Mexico, she edited a special issue (vol. 4, 2011) of the journal Collaborative Anthropologies, focusing on collaborative research methods in Latin America. Field and Rappaport also wrote an introduction to this special issue.

Dr. Rappaport has also published in a variety of scholarly journals, including American Ethnologist, Collaborative Anthropologies, Colonial Latin American Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, History Workshop Journal, Journal of Anthropological Research, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Man, Revista Colombiana de Antropología, Social Analysis, and Varia História, 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 and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Joanne Rappaport is an editor of the journal, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies.