Carlota Mcallister
Biographic Data
| ID | 3636236 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Carlota Mcallister |
| GIVEN NAMES | Carlota |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcallister |
| SIGNATURE | MCALLISTER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 54 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Author Meets Critics
A Genocidal Special Relationship
Maya Q’eqchi’ people carry the remains of their loved ones after an exhumation in Cambayal, in the Alta Verapaz department, Guatemala, 2012. (CAFCA / CC BY 2.0)On May 10, 2013, a Guatemalan court f
Introduction
The introduction to this special issue, "Subversive Religion and More-than-Human Materialities in Latin America," conceptualizes the transformative force of practices often gathered under the rubric of "popular religion," including Indigenous, Black, and campesino ritual as well as vernacular Catholicism and Pentecostalism. Rather than treating these practices as manifesting an essential alterity to either the modern state or the "West," we frame…
The Work Of Grace and the Problem of the Social in a Dam Conflict in Chilean Patagonia = La Obra de la Gracia Y el Problema de lo Social en un Conflicto de Represas en la Patagonia Chilena
This paper deploys an anthropological concept of "theopolitics" to reflect on the political work done and undone by the action of grace during a dam conflict in the Aysén region of Chilean Patagonia. Exploring procedural affinities between the state's instruments for regulating environmental conflict and theories of assemblage that trace relations to overcome Western ontologies, I suggest that their convergent demand for relations to be rendered …
B onar L. H ernández S andoval . Guatemala’s Catholic Revolution
A distinctive feature of the armed revolutionary movements that sprang up in 1970s and 1980s Central America was their ties to the Catholic Church. Their organizations often piggybacked on Catholic structures and processes of community-building while their leaders had often been radicalized through Catholic education and, in some cases, were themselves ordained in the church. Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval’s somewhat ambiguously titled Guatemala’s C…
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
Political Theology/Theopolitics
Anthropological work on political theology has been informed by Agamben's work on the state of exception and, thus, by a Schmittian account of sovereignty as analogous to that of the God who bestows miracles. In this review, we read gestures to this analogy's limits in recent ethnographies of the state, vital force, and the Anthropocene as also pointing to the limits of anthropology's secularity and its embedding in the colonial enterprise. In so…
No One Can Hold It Back
The slogan “Water is Life” rallies anti-extractive movements across the Americas. Critical theorists, however, decry the circumscription of environmental politics by the vitalist attribution of political agency to liveliness. This article tempers that critique by juxtaposing it to the Catholic Church’s claims to sovereignty over life, deploying the resulting slippages between water and life to explore the theopolitical potencies that emerge in wa…
What are the Dead Made of? Exhumations and the Materiality of Indigenous Social Worlds in Postgenocide Guatemala
Guatemala’s landscape is littered with an especially macabre variety of ossuary. From 1960 to 1996, a civil war there claimed some 250,000 civilian lives. Half of those were taken from 1981 to 1983
War by Other Means
A Healthy Life
A T THE HEART Of THE PRObLEM Of CLIMATE change is the question of how our planet’s future will be fueled and at what cost. Economic growth, as well as most of the creature comforts enjoyed in developed and, increasingly, in developing countries, depend on the instant availability of power, even as 1.4 billion people around the world still await connection to the grid. Various fuels have been tapped to supply our need for energy, but most of them …
Worker in the Cane
La propuesta del libro es en apariencia simple: es la historia de vida de Anastasio “Taso” Zayas, un hombre puertorriqueño de unos cincuenta años, que trabaja desde la niñez en el cultivo de la caña, siempre como empleado de alguna gran plantación, y que se convierte a la religión pentecostal en la madurez. La mayoría de la narrativa consiste en las palabras más o menos textuales de Taso, con sus idiosincrasias lingüísticas, su preocupación de ho…
Where the Roads Don’t Reach
Seeing like an indigenous community
This paper uses the case of a rural indigenous village in the war torn highlands of Guatemala to question the framework for using 'agriculture for development' put forth by the World Bank in its 2008 World Development Report. There is a significant gap between the Bank's sanguine vision of recent developments in Guatemala and the limited options available to indigenous rural agrarian producers. This gap stems from critical lacunae in the Report's…
Banners of Belonging
Banners of Belonging
Massacres in the Jungle
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
Political Theology/Theopolitics
Anthropological work on political theology has been informed by Agamben's work on the state of exception and, thus, by a Schmittian account of sovereignty as analogous to that of the God who bestows miracles. In this review, we read gestures to this analogy's limits in recent ethnographies of the state, vital force, and the Anthropocene as also pointing to the limits of anthropology's secularity and its embedding in the colonial enterprise. In so…
Massacres in the Jungle
Seeing like an indigenous community
This paper uses the case of a rural indigenous village in the war torn highlands of Guatemala to question the framework for using 'agriculture for development' put forth by the World Bank in its 2008 World Development Report. There is a significant gap between the Bank's sanguine vision of recent developments in Guatemala and the limited options available to indigenous rural agrarian producers. This gap stems from critical lacunae in the Report's…
Introduction
The introduction to this special issue, "Subversive Religion and More-than-Human Materialities in Latin America," conceptualizes the transformative force of practices often gathered under the rubric of "popular religion," including Indigenous, Black, and campesino ritual as well as vernacular Catholicism and Pentecostalism. Rather than treating these practices as manifesting an essential alterity to either the modern state or the "West," we frame…
What are the Dead Made of? Exhumations and the Materiality of Indigenous Social Worlds in Postgenocide Guatemala
Guatemala’s landscape is littered with an especially macabre variety of ossuary. From 1960 to 1996, a civil war there claimed some 250,000 civilian lives. Half of those were taken from 1981 to 1983
Massacres in the Jungle
Banners of Belonging
Banners of Belonging
Seeing like an indigenous community
This paper uses the case of a rural indigenous village in the war torn highlands of Guatemala to question the framework for using 'agriculture for development' put forth by the World Bank in its 2008 World Development Report. There is a significant gap between the Bank's sanguine vision of recent developments in Guatemala and the limited options available to indigenous rural agrarian producers. This gap stems from critical lacunae in the Report's…
Where the Roads Don’t Reach
War by Other Means
A Healthy Life
A T THE HEART Of THE PRObLEM Of CLIMATE change is the question of how our planet’s future will be fueled and at what cost. Economic growth, as well as most of the creature comforts enjoyed in developed and, increasingly, in developing countries, depend on the instant availability of power, even as 1.4 billion people around the world still await connection to the grid. Various fuels have been tapped to supply our need for energy, but most of them …
Worker in the Cane
La propuesta del libro es en apariencia simple: es la historia de vida de Anastasio “Taso” Zayas, un hombre puertorriqueño de unos cincuenta años, que trabaja desde la niñez en el cultivo de la caña, siempre como empleado de alguna gran plantación, y que se convierte a la religión pentecostal en la madurez. La mayoría de la narrativa consiste en las palabras más o menos textuales de Taso, con sus idiosincrasias lingüísticas, su preocupación de ho…
What are the Dead Made of? Exhumations and the Materiality of Indigenous Social Worlds in Postgenocide Guatemala
Guatemala’s landscape is littered with an especially macabre variety of ossuary. From 1960 to 1996, a civil war there claimed some 250,000 civilian lives. Half of those were taken from 1981 to 1983
No One Can Hold It Back
The slogan “Water is Life” rallies anti-extractive movements across the Americas. Critical theorists, however, decry the circumscription of environmental politics by the vitalist attribution of political agency to liveliness. This article tempers that critique by juxtaposing it to the Catholic Church’s claims to sovereignty over life, deploying the resulting slippages between water and life to explore the theopolitical potencies that emerge in wa…
B onar L. H ernández S andoval . Guatemala’s Catholic Revolution
A distinctive feature of the armed revolutionary movements that sprang up in 1970s and 1980s Central America was their ties to the Catholic Church. Their organizations often piggybacked on Catholic structures and processes of community-building while their leaders had often been radicalized through Catholic education and, in some cases, were themselves ordained in the church. Bonar L. Hernández Sandoval’s somewhat ambiguously titled Guatemala’s C…
Beyond the Human Horizon
Amid a moment of crisis, how might the anthropology of religion shift its focus from ethics to politics? This 2021 Rappaport Lecture, delivered at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) Biennial Meeting on 15 May 2021, begins by highlighting three ways in which our field has taken on politics in recent years: by troubling the distinction between ethics and politics, by thinking religion together with pressing political issues, and by …
Political Theology/Theopolitics
Anthropological work on political theology has been informed by Agamben's work on the state of exception and, thus, by a Schmittian account of sovereignty as analogous to that of the God who bestows miracles. In this review, we read gestures to this analogy's limits in recent ethnographies of the state, vital force, and the Anthropocene as also pointing to the limits of anthropology's secularity and its embedding in the colonial enterprise. In so…
A Genocidal Special Relationship
Maya Q’eqchi’ people carry the remains of their loved ones after an exhumation in Cambayal, in the Alta Verapaz department, Guatemala, 2012. (CAFCA / CC BY 2.0)On May 10, 2013, a Guatemalan court f
Introduction
The introduction to this special issue, "Subversive Religion and More-than-Human Materialities in Latin America," conceptualizes the transformative force of practices often gathered under the rubric of "popular religion," including Indigenous, Black, and campesino ritual as well as vernacular Catholicism and Pentecostalism. Rather than treating these practices as manifesting an essential alterity to either the modern state or the "West," we frame…
The Work Of Grace and the Problem of the Social in a Dam Conflict in Chilean Patagonia = La Obra de la Gracia Y el Problema de lo Social en un Conflicto de Represas en la Patagonia Chilena
This paper deploys an anthropological concept of "theopolitics" to reflect on the political work done and undone by the action of grace during a dam conflict in the Aysén region of Chilean Patagonia. Exploring procedural affinities between the state's instruments for regulating environmental conflict and theories of assemblage that trace relations to overcome Western ontologies, I suggest that their convergent demand for relations to be rendered …
Author Meets Critics
Political science (12 works) · Law (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Art (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (4 works) · Ethnology (4 works) · History (4 works)