Roberto I. Armengol

Cultural Anthropology

Regional focus: Everyday life, power and the state; nationalism, racism and the culture of politics; language and the media; visual and humanistic ethnography.

Topical interests: Everyday life and informal networks; the politics of nationality, transnationality, ethnicity and race; language and the media; visual and humanistic ethnography.

My wife and I are in Cuba with our young daughter for my dissertation research. Ophelia is a documentary photographer with an eye for the compelling in the quotidian. I'll be writing about daily life in Havana and the many ways in which Cubans have negotiated dramatic social and economic changes on the island since the Soviet collapse. We are especially interested in new public arenas -- like farmers markets and tourist fairs -- which llow social actors to rethink ideas about nationality and socialism through their everyday practices of exchange.

I came to anthropology from a decent career in journalism to figure out what bothered me about the day-to-day of newspaper reporting. Sometimes I yearn for the good old days of frequent bylines and real deadlines. But of course, there's no simple "going back." After a graduate education in anthropology you can never see the world in quite the same way again, and writing about it becomes much harder, if more rewarding.

MA Paper: Making Cuba: The Anthropology of Fernando Ortiz. May 2005.

Conference presentations:

February 2006. "Island of Ambiguity: Informal Networks and Everyday Life in Cuba." Based on summer pre-field research. Sixth Annual Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, Florida International University. Miami, Fla.

March 2006 (with SherriLynn Colby-Bottel). "Aftermath, Improvised: Rebuilding 'the Spirit of New Orleans' On-Air and Online." Fifth Annual American Cultures Conference, College of William & Mary. Williamsburg, Va.

Home page: http://www.people.virginia.edu/~ria3k