Fernando Santos-Granero is the 2021 Smithsonian Distinguished Scholar in the Humanities
Dr. Santos-Granero presented his webcast lecture “El Dorado and the City of Tapirs: Enchanted Cities and Urban Imaginaries in Indigenous Amazonia” at the presentation ceremony May 5.
After a delay due to COVID-19, Dr. Fernando Santos-Granero has been chosen to receive the 2021 Smithsonian Distinguished Scholar Award in the Humanities. The Distinguished Scholar Award, first given in 2000, celebrates excellence in all branches of Smithsonian scholarship by honoring the sustained achievement of two outstanding Smithsonian scholars each year—one in the sciences and one in the humanities. The winners are asked to deliver a lecture on some aspect of their work to the Smithsonian community and interested members of the general public, and they receive a medal and a contribution to their research funds.
Dr. Santos-Granero is a senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He has done ethnographic research in the Yanesha and Ashaninka communities of Central Peru and historical research on the Indigenous societies and regional economies of Upper Amazonia.
His publications include numerous articles on Yanesha social organization, political leadership, shamanism, myth, ritual, and history. He has also made important contributions to the topics of leadership and power, landscape and history, people-making and bodyscapes, culture and language, kinship and friendship, knowledge and corporeality, and sorcery and modernity.
He is the author of The Power of Love: The Moral Use of Knowledge amongst the Amuesha of Central Peru (1991) and Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life (2009), and he is the editor of The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Personhood (2009) and Images of Public Wealth or the Anatomy of Well-Being in Native Amazonia (2015). With Frederica Barclay he has co-authored the books Selva Central: History, Economy, and Land Use in Peruvian Amazonia (1998) and Tamed Frontiers: Economy, Society, and Civil Rights in Upper Amazonia (2000).
His most recent book, Slavery and Utopia: The Wars and Dreams of an Amazonian World Transformer, was published in 2019 (University of Texas Press). He holds an undergraduate degree in anthropology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (1981) and a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (1986).
The committee who assisted with the selection of the 2021 recipient are:
- Kenneth Slowik, Chair (NMAH)
- Louise Cort (FSG)
- David DeVorkin (NASM)
- Giovanni Fazio (SAO)
- Christine Jones (SAO)
- Nancy Knowlton (NMNH)
- Christine Mullen Kreamer (NMAA)
- Igor Krupnik (NMNH)
- Ellen Miles (NPG)
- Michael Neufeld (NASM)
- Tom Watters (NASM Center for Earth and Planetary Studies)
Learn more about Dr. Santos-Granero’s research focus here.
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Posted: 18 May 2022
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Categories:
History and Culture , Kudos , Science and Nature , Tropical Research Institute
