Ellen Moodie
Biographic Data
| ID | 649226 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ellen Moodie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ellen |
| FAMILY NAME | Moodie |
| SIGNATURE | MOODIE E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6236-6505 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Expert Witnessing in the Asylum Economy
Homeland Security lawyers routinely ask experts in immigration court cases about compensation for their labor. The suggestion is that if money has been exchanged, perhaps their opinions have been bought. Meanwhile, pro bono offerings can be seen as "activism"-motivated beyond the court-framed "truth." Even as I offer many declarations pro bono, I have come to recognize, uneasily, my role in an extended network of coyote types who convey people to…
Visceral non-presence: Ethnography in the age of Covid
The local slaughterhouse’s coronavirus cluster was the first large outbreak we heard about in Champaign County. The sprawling pork processing plant sits in the midst of cornfields some 17 miles north of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Until early May, workers there processed 35 million pounds of pork a month. The company reported its first case on 25 April. Health inspectors arrived two days later to find the plant 90 percent out …
Generations and Change in Central America: An Introduction
In this introduction we consider generation and change in Central America as part of the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of this journal. We reflect on meanings of generation, starting with Salvador Allende's 1972 declaration: "To be young and not revolutionary may even be a biological contradiction." Karl Mannheim's theorization of generation as a cohort sharing formative experiences in particular historical moments, often requiring …
From Sparks and Embers: Concluding Reflections on Anthropology, Generation, and Central America
This conclusion to the In-Focus Issue on generation and politics in Central America places the concept of generation in dialogue with an intellectual genealogy emanating from JLACA's twenty-five years of publication, recent debates about decolonization within anthropology, and personal reflections from the coauthors
La línea, los Indignados, and the Post-Postwar Generation in El Salvador
This article analyzes the political emergence of El Salvador's "post-postwar generation" through a consideration of activists' relationships to a political and revolutionary "party line," la línea. This generation comprises people born at the end of, or after, the 1980-92 civil war. They have little or no memory of the war but have grown up in intense violence. The authors worked with members of this generation in distinct sites: in Segundo Monte…
From Gringa to Yuma: Slow Arrival in Cuba
Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory
Book Review| August 01 2018 Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory. By Ching, Erik. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 345 pp. Cloth, $85.00. Ellen Moodie Ellen Moodie University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Hispanic American Historical Review (201…
The Post-Cold War Anthropology of Central America
This article reviews the recent and emerging post-Cold War sociocultural anthropology research on Central America, defined as the five countries that share a common colonial and postcolonial history: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Following a consideration of the foundational literature widely engaged by scholars to theorize regional processes, three sections reflect major themes of investigation in the area: politic…
Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death
Adiós Niño is a hard read. Set in a grim Guatemala City, it starts out by telling us that urban youth, once “heroic,” are now “criminal”: all have “gone down the drain” (p. 2). The book thus at first appears to be an account of the rise of the notorious gangs in the largest city in Central America. But, situated in historian Deborah Levenson's long-term research on social movements in the country, it is something more (and also less).Certainly th…
Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala. by Diane Nelson
El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy
After El Salvador's brutal civil war ended in 1992, crime rates shot up. People began to speak of the peace as "worse than the war." This study examines how narratives of post-conflict violence, told by ordinary people, offered ways of coping with uncertainty during a stunted transition to democracy
Waves of Protest: Popular Struggle in El Salvador, 1925–2005. By Paul D. Almeida
Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States by Susan Bibler Coutin
An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline edited by Alisse Waterston
Seventeen Years, Seventeen Murders
This essay develops the concept of biospectacle, in which the politics of managing populations becomes sensational visual display. It does so as it explores a series of events in 1999 surrounding the arrest and trial of “El Directo,” a gang member in El Salvador who, at age seventeen, was accused of seventeen murders. The episode occurred at a key political conjuncture, at the end of a brutal decade in which staggering crime rates belied the Cent…
Wretched Bodies, White Marches, and theCuatroVisiÃ3nPublic in El Salvador
To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920-1932
Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America by Angelina Snodgrass Godoy
Microbus crashes and Coca-Cola cash
In this article, I explore valuation of dead bodies in postwar El Salvador. Taking the view that human-rights violations are, in Paul Farmer's words, "symptoms of deeper pathologies of power," I start with the seemingly random violence of a fatal bus crash. I then broaden the focus to other categories of suffering undervalued by institutional discourses. The shift in death's meanings comprises a political project undermining the collective agency…
Microbus crashes and Coca-Cola cash
In this article, I explore valuation of dead bodies in postwar El Salvador. Taking the view that human-rights violations are, in Paul Farmer's words, "symptoms of deeper pathologies of power," I start with the seemingly random violence of a fatal bus crash. I then broaden the focus to other categories of suffering undervalued by institutional discourses. The shift in death's meanings comprises a political project undermining the collective agency…
Seventeen Years, Seventeen Murders
This essay develops the concept of biospectacle, in which the politics of managing populations becomes sensational visual display. It does so as it explores a series of events in 1999 surrounding the arrest and trial of “El Directo,” a gang member in El Salvador who, at age seventeen, was accused of seventeen murders. The episode occurred at a key political conjuncture, at the end of a brutal decade in which staggering crime rates belied the Cent…
The Post-Cold War Anthropology of Central America
This article reviews the recent and emerging post-Cold War sociocultural anthropology research on Central America, defined as the five countries that share a common colonial and postcolonial history: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Following a consideration of the foundational literature widely engaged by scholars to theorize regional processes, three sections reflect major themes of investigation in the area: politic…
Visceral non-presence: Ethnography in the age of Covid
The local slaughterhouse’s coronavirus cluster was the first large outbreak we heard about in Champaign County. The sprawling pork processing plant sits in the midst of cornfields some 17 miles north of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Until early May, workers there processed 35 million pounds of pork a month. The company reported its first case on 25 April. Health inspectors arrived two days later to find the plant 90 percent out …
Wretched Bodies, White Marches, and theCuatroVisiÃ3nPublic in El Salvador
Expert Witnessing in the Asylum Economy
Homeland Security lawyers routinely ask experts in immigration court cases about compensation for their labor. The suggestion is that if money has been exchanged, perhaps their opinions have been bought. Meanwhile, pro bono offerings can be seen as "activism"-motivated beyond the court-framed "truth." Even as I offer many declarations pro bono, I have come to recognize, uneasily, my role in an extended network of coyote types who convey people to…
Generations and Change in Central America: An Introduction
In this introduction we consider generation and change in Central America as part of the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of this journal. We reflect on meanings of generation, starting with Salvador Allende's 1972 declaration: "To be young and not revolutionary may even be a biological contradiction." Karl Mannheim's theorization of generation as a cohort sharing formative experiences in particular historical moments, often requiring …
From Gringa to Yuma: Slow Arrival in Cuba
Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America by Angelina Snodgrass Godoy
Microbus crashes and Coca-Cola cash
In this article, I explore valuation of dead bodies in postwar El Salvador. Taking the view that human-rights violations are, in Paul Farmer's words, "symptoms of deeper pathologies of power," I start with the seemingly random violence of a fatal bus crash. I then broaden the focus to other categories of suffering undervalued by institutional discourses. The shift in death's meanings comprises a political project undermining the collective agency…
To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920-1932
Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America by Angelina Snodgrass Godoy
Seventeen Years, Seventeen Murders
This essay develops the concept of biospectacle, in which the politics of managing populations becomes sensational visual display. It does so as it explores a series of events in 1999 surrounding the arrest and trial of “El Directo,” a gang member in El Salvador who, at age seventeen, was accused of seventeen murders. The episode occurred at a key political conjuncture, at the end of a brutal decade in which staggering crime rates belied the Cent…
Wretched Bodies, White Marches, and theCuatroVisiÃ3nPublic in El Salvador
El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy
After El Salvador's brutal civil war ended in 1992, crime rates shot up. People began to speak of the peace as "worse than the war." This study examines how narratives of post-conflict violence, told by ordinary people, offered ways of coping with uncertainty during a stunted transition to democracy
Waves of Protest: Popular Struggle in El Salvador, 1925–2005. By Paul D. Almeida
Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States by Susan Bibler Coutin
An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline edited by Alisse Waterston
Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala. by Diane Nelson
Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death
Adiós Niño is a hard read. Set in a grim Guatemala City, it starts out by telling us that urban youth, once “heroic,” are now “criminal”: all have “gone down the drain” (p. 2). The book thus at first appears to be an account of the rise of the notorious gangs in the largest city in Central America. But, situated in historian Deborah Levenson's long-term research on social movements in the country, it is something more (and also less).Certainly th…
The Post-Cold War Anthropology of Central America
This article reviews the recent and emerging post-Cold War sociocultural anthropology research on Central America, defined as the five countries that share a common colonial and postcolonial history: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Following a consideration of the foundational literature widely engaged by scholars to theorize regional processes, three sections reflect major themes of investigation in the area: politic…
Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory
Book Review| August 01 2018 Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory. By Ching, Erik. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 345 pp. Cloth, $85.00. Ellen Moodie Ellen Moodie University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Hispanic American Historical Review (201…
From Gringa to Yuma: Slow Arrival in Cuba
Visceral non-presence: Ethnography in the age of Covid
The local slaughterhouse’s coronavirus cluster was the first large outbreak we heard about in Champaign County. The sprawling pork processing plant sits in the midst of cornfields some 17 miles north of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Until early May, workers there processed 35 million pounds of pork a month. The company reported its first case on 25 April. Health inspectors arrived two days later to find the plant 90 percent out …
Generations and Change in Central America: An Introduction
In this introduction we consider generation and change in Central America as part of the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of this journal. We reflect on meanings of generation, starting with Salvador Allende's 1972 declaration: "To be young and not revolutionary may even be a biological contradiction." Karl Mannheim's theorization of generation as a cohort sharing formative experiences in particular historical moments, often requiring …
From Sparks and Embers: Concluding Reflections on Anthropology, Generation, and Central America
This conclusion to the In-Focus Issue on generation and politics in Central America places the concept of generation in dialogue with an intellectual genealogy emanating from JLACA's twenty-five years of publication, recent debates about decolonization within anthropology, and personal reflections from the coauthors
La línea, los Indignados, and the Post-Postwar Generation in El Salvador
This article analyzes the political emergence of El Salvador's "post-postwar generation" through a consideration of activists' relationships to a political and revolutionary "party line," la línea. This generation comprises people born at the end of, or after, the 1980-92 civil war. They have little or no memory of the war but have grown up in intense violence. The authors worked with members of this generation in distinct sites: in Segundo Monte…
Expert Witnessing in the Asylum Economy
Homeland Security lawyers routinely ask experts in immigration court cases about compensation for their labor. The suggestion is that if money has been exchanged, perhaps their opinions have been bought. Meanwhile, pro bono offerings can be seen as "activism"-motivated beyond the court-framed "truth." Even as I offer many declarations pro bono, I have come to recognize, uneasily, my role in an extended network of coyote types who convey people to…
History (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · History (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Citation (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Art history (7 works) · Computer Science (7 works)