Christopher Krupa

Christopher Krupa
Associate Professor
Telephone number
(416) 208-2893
Building HL 326

Christopher Krupa is a cultural anthropologist with a PhD from the University of California, Davis. His work is broadly concerned with the social life of power and the ways people come to feel, express, and confront its violence in everyday life. For over 15 years he has been conducting research with indigenous communities in highland Ecuador struggling to contain the racializing force of global agribusiness in their territories. More recently he has worked with ex-guerrilla fighters wrestling with the poetic legacies of state terror and revolutionary violence of post-cold war Latin America. His latest book is a study of the intersections of race and capitalism in the postcolonial world and his previous book sought to reconceptualize political domination by focusing on the intimate, affective, and embodied life of the state. He also continues to research and write about violence itself and its manifestations in and beyond the law.

Teaching Interests

Political Ecology
Development, Inequality, and Social Change in Latin America
Anthropology of the End of the World
Producing People and Things: Economics and Social Life
Political Anthropology
Formations of State and Anti-State
The Anthropology of Violence and Suffering

Research Interests

violence; racial capitalism; (post)coloniality; state and para-state complexes; political affect; embodiment; plantation systems; labor, debt and finance; critical race theory; political economy; history and historicity; indigeneity; Latin America

Selected Recent Publications

2022.    A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador. University of Pennsylvania Press.

2019    “The Politics of Intellectual Labor under Contemporary Capitalist Restructuring”. In Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 84 (July).

2015      (with Mercedes Prieto) “Corpus Mysticum estatal o ¿cómo podemos pensar el estado en América Latina hoy?” In Íconos: Revista de Ciencias Sociales Num. 52, Quito, mayo 2015, pp. 11-17.

2015.   State Theory and Andean Politics: New Approaches to the Study of Rule (co-edited with David Nugent). University of Pennsylvania Press. (Article on the book in UTSC Commons http://utsccommons.utsc.utoronto.ca/spring-2015/mosaic/breakthrough-thinking)

2015 (with David Nugent) “Off-Centered States: Re-thinking State Theory through an Andean Lens.” In State Theory and Andean Politics: New Approaches to the Study of Rule. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp 1-31.