Melissa Alejandra Arellano


Melissa Arellano Nelson Entered 2005 arellano@cms.mail.virginia.edu
Sociocultural Anthropology Regional focus: Greece. Topical interests: Negotiated identities and invented traditions; honor, performativity. I am increasingly convinced that anthropology is not about finding the right answers but rather about asking the interesting questions. When words that strike at the very core of our being, such as "identity" and "tradition," are prefaced with adjectives like "negotiated" and "invented," the question never ceases to be raised: "What is real?" This question is neither correct nor interesting. Rather, my struggle and my passion is to ask the question, "How is it real?" and "Why?" My previous research during the course of my master's degree sought to ask the why and how of the Scottish kilt. I posed the question, How can the Scottish kilt stand both as commodity and as traditional dress? Embedded in this question was not only the possibility that the kilt could simultaneously stand both as commodity and as tradition but that it must. My work challenged connotations of "falsity" too easily ascribed to idioms of "invention." I was in the end asking anthropology to question the notion of authenticity itself. My future research will pick up the theoretical threads of my previous work with respect to how we understand ourselves and why this is significant I hope to fit this theoretical frame around the discourse of honor. I am asking how changing conceptions of honor in Greece inform a negotiated consciousness of identity with respect to traditions of performativity. In other words, I want to ask how the way people conceive of honor relates to how they conceive of themselves. Teasing out its traces, I am working to revisit honor as a metonym for identity. MA Thesis (Victoria University of Manchester): 2004. The Commodification of Authenticity: The Social Life of the Scottish Highland Tartan Kilt. Publications: 2003. Book Review: Translation and Ethnography: The Anthropological Challenge of Intercultural Understanding, Maranhao and Streck (eds.). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, March 2005 (11): 165.

Melissa Arellano Nelson

Entered 2005
arellano@cms.mail.virginia.edu

Sociocultural Anthropology

Regional focus: Greece.

Topical interests: Negotiated identities and invented traditions; honor, performativity.

I am increasingly convinced that anthropology is not about finding the right answers but rather about asking the interesting questions. When words that strike at the very core of our being, such as "identity" and "tradition," are prefaced with adjectives like "negotiated" and "invented," the question never ceases to be raised: "What is real?" This question is neither correct nor interesting. Rather, my struggle and my passion is to ask the question, "How is it real?" and "Why?"

My previous research during the course of my master's degree sought to ask the why and how of the Scottish kilt. I posed the question, How can the Scottish kilt stand both as commodity and as traditional dress? Embedded in this question was not only the possibility that the kilt could simultaneously stand both as commodity and as tradition but that it must. My work challenged connotations of "falsity" too easily ascribed to idioms of "invention." I was in the end asking anthropology to question the notion of authenticity itself.

My future research will pick up the theoretical threads of my previous work with respect to how we understand ourselves and why this is significant I hope to fit this theoretical frame around the discourse of honor. I am asking how changing conceptions of honor in Greece inform a negotiated consciousness of identity with respect to traditions of performativity. In other words, I want to ask how the way people conceive of honor relates to how they conceive of themselves. Teasing out its traces, I am working to revisit honor as a metonym for identity.

MA Thesis (Victoria University of Manchester): 2004. The Commodification of Authenticity: The Social Life of the Scottish Highland Tartan Kilt.

Publications:

2003. Book Review: Translation and Ethnography: The Anthropological Challenge of Intercultural Understanding, Maranhao and Streck (eds.). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, March 2005 (11): 165.