Claudio Lomnitz

Claudio Lomnitz

Research Interests

Research Concentrations

Public Social Services, Anthropology of National Societies, Iberoamerican Intellectual History

Regions

Latin America; Mexico

Biography

Lomnitz works on the history, politics and culture of Latin America, and particularly of Mexico. He received his PhD from Stanford in 1987.  His first book, Evolución de una sociedad rural (Mexico City, 1982) was a study of politics and cultural change in Tepoztlán, Mexico. After that he developed an interest in conceptualizing the nation-state as a particular kind of cultural region, a theme that culminated in Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National Space (California, 1992). In that book, Lomnitz concentrated on the social work of intellectuals, a theme that he developed in various works on the history of public culture in Mexico, including Modernidad Indiana (Mexico City, 1999) and Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minnesota, 2001).

Around twenty years ago Lomnitz began working on the historical anthropology of crisis and published Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2005), a political and cultural history of death in Mexico from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. After that, he wrote a history of exile and ideology in the Mexican Revolution titled The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Zone Books, 2014). Lomnitz's interest in exile extended to his own family history, published as Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation (Other Press, 2021), which is an essay that explores the connection between the destruction of Europe and (Latin) American consciousness.

Since 2021, Claudio Lomnitz has turned his attention to bringing anthropological insight to the transformation of the state and of community in contemporary Mexico, and especially to the study of the disjointed relationship between sovereignty and the state.  This has resulted in the publication of a trilogy in Spanish: El tejido social rasgado (Ediciones ERA, 2022), Para una teología política del crimen organizado (Ediciones ERA, 2023), and Antropología de la zona de silencio (Ediciones ERA, in press).  The first of these was translated into English as Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico (Duke University Press, 2024).

Lomnitz also writes in nonacademic genres ,and has for many years been a regular contributor to the Mexico City press. He has also written two plays in collaboration with his brother, Alberto Lomnitz, who is a theater director in Mexico City. The first, El verdadero Bulnes, won Mexico’s National Drama Award in 2010; and the second, a musical titled La Gran Familia, was co-produced by Mexico's National Theater Company and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 2018.

Lomnitz is also the Director of Columbia's new Social Studies of Disappearance Lab, that is housed in the Anthropology Department.

Education

Stanford University, PhD in Anthropology, 1987
Stanford University, MA in Anthropology, 1979
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City, Licenciado, 1978

Forthcoming. "Ethos and Telos of Michoacán's Knights Templar." Representations (Summer 2019 issue).

2019. “Otros 19 en San Fernando.” La Jornada (website).

2019b. “Orígenes de la Teoría (con mayúscula), una teoría (con minúscula).” Nexos (website).

2019d. “Tren Maya: Los zapatistas tienen razón.” La Jornada (website).

2019c. "Tlahuelilpan: Imaginario político vs económico.” La Jornada (website).

2015. “Secularism and the Mexican Revolution.” In Beyond the Secular West, edited by Akeel Bilgrami, 97-116. New York: Columbia University Press.

2014. “Mexico’s First Lynching: Crime, Moral Panic, Dependency.” Critical Historical Studies 1, no. 1: 85-123.

2012. “Time and Dependency in Latin America Today.” Special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 2: 348-357.

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