A Teacher of the Koran

2015

Cosmopolitan Archaeologies, 2009

Pre-Hispanic Archaeology and the Reproduction of Global Difference This is something. This has got to be contemporary. He's really going to town. It's very jaunty, very authoritative. His errand might prove to be impossible. He is challenging something-or something has challenged him. He's grounded in immediate reality by the bicycle.. .. He's apparently a very proud and silent man. He's dressed sort of polyglot. Nothing looks like it fits him too well.-james baldwin, Perspectives: Angles on African Art

A Companion to Late Antique and Medieval Islamic Cordoba, 2023

This chapter deals in detail with the interior of the walled perimeter of Cordoba. The medina occupies the space of the ancient Roman and late antique city and reuses some of its main constructions and infrastructures, such as the city walls or the sewerage. Combining written sources and archaeological findings, this paper aims to collect up-to-date knowledge about the walls, gates, roads, centers of political and religious power, residences, baths, mosques, and water supply, etc. The quality and entity of the residential architecture shows that the medina is a privileged space, where the headquarters of power, the residences of the authorities, and the palaces of the members of the Umayyad family circle were situated. Based on this information, this paper also attempts to reconstruct the layout of the streets of the Umayyad medina, whose current image is the result of a long and uninterrupted process of evolution and change. It is also the consequence of the densification of the space, which occurred in times of political instability.

International Review of Social History, 2004

This case study provides an example of how people from two fundamentally different cultures (one rural, indigenous, Kichua-speaking and peasant, and the other urban, white, Spanish-speaking and professional) overcame their differences to struggle together to fight social injustices. Rather than relating to each other on a seemingly unequal basis, the activists recognized their common interests in fighting against the imposition of an international capitalist system on Ecuador's agrarian economy. Emerging out of that context, activists framed collective interests, identities, ideas, and demands as they worked together to realize common goals. Their actions challenge commonly held assumptions that leftist activists did not understand indigenous struggles, or that indigenous peoples remained distant from the goals of leftist political parties. Rather, it points to how the two struggles became intimately intertwined. In the process, it complicates traditional understandings of the role of ''popular intellectuals'', and how they interact with other activists, the dominant culture, and the state. Ã This essay is based primarily on research in the Fondo Junta Central de Asistencia Pú blica (JCAP) of the Archivo Nacional de Medicina del Museo Nacional de Medicina ''Dr Eduardo Estrella'', in Quito, Ecuador. Special thanks go to Antonio Crespo for facilitating access to that collection of government documents. Sandra Fernández Muñ oz and Jorge Canizares lent access to the private collection of Leonardo J. Muñ oz, an early leftist leader, which provides a counterpart to the JCAP documents. Additional primary-source documentation of this history is from Quito's main daily newspaper, El Comercio, and the Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Pó lit [hereafter BEAEP] in Cotocollao, Ecuador.

Constructing Iberian Identities, 1000-1700, 2022

Unpacking the Collection, 2011

On the Pacific coast of Ecuador, the late precontact Manteño (800–1530 CE) culture is noted for its distinctive corpus of stone seats, stelae and other sculpture. The Manteño seats in particular have long played a key role in Ecuadorian iconographies of national identity in ...

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2011

Gonzalo Oleas Zambrano was a socialist lawyer from Quito who, from the 1930s to the 1970s, became deeply involved in assisting rural communities in Ecuador with their legal petitions. Intermediaries have a long and varied history in negotiating relationships between the city and the countryside, and one that is often not well understood. At various points in his career Oleas acted like a tinterillo, a socialist and an indigenista. An examination of Oleas’ petitions quickly breaks down a simplistic characterisation of his actions and interpretation of his motivation. Rather, his ability to transcend existing categories helps explain why rural litigants so often turned to Oleas for assistance.

International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2017

A series of seven statues commissioned by the mayor of the Canton of Colta in 2007 represent an emerging aspect of public art in the Andes: municipal statuary sponsored by Indigenous communities. The figures chosen for these statues represent Colta to the world, and embody a postcolonial heritage in which figures from Juan de Velasco’s eighteenth century Historia del Reino de Quito mix with local twentieth century heroes, in a medium directly descended from the Andean urbanism of the Liberal nineteenth century.

1 Universidad de Vigo Recibido el 25 de mayo de 2017. Evaluado el 15 de enero de 2018.