Research

The first, “Living Color,” tracks the manipulation of appearances – of both the human body and the built environment – in Rio de Janeiro. Through an ethnography of Afro-aesthetic makeup practices and urban renewal projects, I demonstrate how the making over of both the skin and the urban landscape shape political inequality and contribute to productions of race, gender, and national belonging.

The second, “Chromagraphy,” moves outward from makeup and bodily aesthetics and toward an anthropological theory of color. It is comparative (drawing on fieldwork in Brazil, Guatemala, and in the US southwest), historical, that is, examining splashes of color through the anthropological archive, and collaborative across the subdisciplines.