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E-mail: n.tassi@ucl.ac.uk, altoplanico@googlemail.com |
PhD in Social Anthropology (2008)
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Research Interests
My PhD analysed the workings of representation as material practice through an ethnographic study of urbanized indigenous (cholos) in the city of La Paz, Bolivia. While representations have typically been treated in the humanities and social sciences as symbolic forms belonging to the realm of ideas, my study focused on the way in which representation functioned as an interface between the conceptual and the material, the spiritual and the material, abstract and physical worlds.
My current work explores the market economy of cholos in La Paz, one of the most successful examples of indigenous entrepreneurship in the region, focusing on the relation between economic practice and religious beliefs, material and spiritual domains. My research analyses the practices of a market economy where material abundance, rather than scarcity, is the founding principle of exchange and circulation.
My research interests
include Anthropology and Epistemology, Ritual and Religion, Aesthetics and
Visual Culture, Economy and Cosmology.
Publications
(Forthcoming) TASSI N. & Espirito Santo, D. (eds.). Making Spirits. Materiality and Transcendence in Contemporary Religion. Londres: IB Tauris. 2011
TASSI, N. The Postulate of Abundance. Cholo Market and Religion in La Paz Bolivia. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale. 2010; 18 (2).
TASSI, N. Cuando el baile mueve montañas. Religión y economía cholo-mestiza en La Paz, Bolivia [When the dance moves mountains. Cholo-mestizo market and religion in La Paz, Bolivia]. La Paz: PRAIA. 2010
TASSI, N. De la reproducción a la producción y vuelta: una reinterpretación de la economía de Gran Poder [From reproduction to production and back. A reinterpretation of the Gran Poder economy]. In Repensando el mestizaje. Anales de la XXIII Reunión Annual de Etnología. La Paz: MUSEF. 2010
