Identidad Vallenata

I did a PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University (1981-1985), which involved 16 months of fieldwork in Colombia, based in a small town called Unguía, near the Panamanian border, exploring ethnic relations and ideas about race. Between 1985 and 1988, I held a Research Fellowship at Queens' College, Cambridge, and did another 14 months of fieldwork in Colombia, mostly in the city of Medellín, focusing on black migrants to the city from the Pacific coastal region. In 1988, I got a job as a lecturer in the University of Liverpool (jointly in the Department of Geography and the Institute of Latin American Studies). In 1995, I took up a post as lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, where I am now professor. Since 1988, I have done several spells of fieldwork in Colombia, looking at the black social movement and constitutional reform, and tracing the social history of Colombian popular music in the twentieth century and its connections with ideas about nation and race. More recently, I have been exploring the construction of nature, biology, genetics and culture in ideas about race.

 

Peter Wade