Professor Tristan Platt, School Visiting Professorial Fellow (September 2010 to January 2011)
Professor Tristan Platt of the Department of Social Anthropology, School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, has been awarded the Visiting Professorial Fellowship for 2010/2011 in the School for Advanced Study, which he will hold for 5 months from 1 September.
Professor Platt carried out his first fieldwork with the Macha of Potosí, Bolivia, in 1970-71. Between 1973 and 1983 he lived, researched and taught in the Andes. He came to St Andrews in 1988. He has participated in an Inter-American Foundation research project with the Institute of Peruvian Studies and the National Archive of Bolivia, an ESRC-CNRS Franco-British research project on the ethnohistory of Charcas, a European Commission project (DGXII) on Appropriate Methods of Childbirth in the Andes, and has held a Guggenheim Latin American and Caribbean Research Fellowship on the history of Andean mining. He is a Member of the Society of Americanists, Paris, and the Royal Anthropological Society, London. He has held positions with the University of Tarapacá (Chile), the Museo de Etnografía y Folclore (La Paz, Bolivia), the Universities of Salamanca and Pablo de Olavide (Seville), Spain, and has taught in six Andean countries of South America, as well as in Mexico, France and the US.
His research focuses on State-community relations, the history of mining and refining technologies, rituals of embodiment, Quechua textuality, and the relation between the field and the archive. He is author of Estado boliviano y Ayllu andino: Tierra y Tributo en el Norte de Potosí (Institute of Peruvian Studies, Lima 1982; 2nd edition forthcoming), and (with Thérèse Bouysse-Cassagne and Olivia Harris) Qaraqara-Charka: Mallku, Inka y Rey en la Provincia de Charcas (La Paz 2006; 2nd edition forthcoming). He has also authored some 50 articles on Andean and related themes, and is at present co-editing a volume on the relations between Amerindian groups of the Andes and the Amazon.
Professor Platt will be associated with the Institute for the Study of the Americas (ISA), and will pursue research on the Rothschild quicksilver monopoly and South American silver-mining in the 19th century. He will give a lecture in the Dean's Seminar series on 1 November entitled "From imperial protection to 'free trade': quicksilver, the Rothschilds and 19th century Bolivia", and the School Visiting Professorial Lecture on 30 November, with the title "Between powers: the Amerindian confederations of Charcas (Bolivia) before and after the Spanish invasion".
