Marisol de la Cadena

Marisol de la Cadena is a Professor of Anthropology and of Science and Technology Studies at the University of California, Davis. Her interests include the study of politics, multispecies (or multi-entities), indigeneity, history and the a-historical, world anthropologies and the anthropologies of worlds. She explores how different communities understand land and collective life, especially when those ways of knowing do not fit neatly within Western academic or political frameworks. Her scholarship has helped expand conversations about culture, community and the relationships between people and the natural environment. 

Cadena's first book, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1910-1991 (2000) is an historical and ethnographic analysis of race relations in the Andes. Her more recent book Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015) is based on conversations with two Quechua-speaking men that lived in Cuzco, Peru. Through these conversations, they think together about life at the intriguing crossroads where modern politics (and history) and earth-beings (and the ahistorical) meet and diverge.

Cadena received an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Durham and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.