Miriam Shakow
Email: shakowm@tcnj.edu
Office: Social Science Building 337
Degrees Earned:
Ph.D. 2008 Harvard University, Anthropology
M.A. 2004 Harvard University, Anthropology
B.A. 1997 Swarthmore College
Courses Taught:
ANT 110 Introduction to Anthropology
ANT 340 Social Change in Latin America
Recent Research:
Miriam Shakow is a social anthropologist interested in how people experience state transformations. Her work focuses particularly on how Latin Americans reshape their identities through their participation in political movements and parties. Her dissertation was a study of recent municipal conflict in central Bolivia during which six mayors were ousted from office over the course of six years. She examined how indigenous middle class Bolivians participated in and commented about these local political conflicts, free market economic policies, and new, socialist political parties. Her new research project focuses on the ways in which teenagers and young adults have become the objects of fear in Bolivia and throughout Latin America in the context of rising unemployment and rising crime. For her next project, she plans to compare local political machines in urban Bolivia and New Jersey.
Work in progress:
“Moral Economies of Politics: Patronage, Neoliberalism and Radicalism in Bolivia” (to be submitted to PoLAR - the Political and Legal Anthropology Review)
“Andean ‘Civil Society’ and Political Imaginaries in Central Bolivia”
(under review, American Anthropologist).
“States of Discontent: Patronage, Liberalism, and Indigenist Democracy in Bolivia” (book manuscript)
