14.06.2026 Guest Lecture: Rethinking the Isthmo-Colombian Area: Politics, Knowledge Production, and the (Un)Making of a Cultural Region

On 23 June 2026, the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology welcomes anthropologist Mònica Martínez Mauri for a guest lecture on the historical construction of the Isthmo-Colombian cultural region.

This talk revisits the mid-twentieth-century efforts by U.S., Latin American, and European anthropologists to conceptualize the Isthmo-Colombian region as a cultural area distinct from Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Amazonia, while also emphasizing the shared cultural features that connect the societies of this region. One important formulation in this process was the Circum-Caribbean area presented in the Handbook of South American Indians (1940s). Drawing on archival materials from the National Anthropological Archives (Smithsonian Institution), the presentation shifts attention away from the ethnographic and archaeological evidence used to define the region and instead examines the political and economic contexts that shaped scientific research and regional classifications. It argues that the Isthmo-Colombian area—characterized by both cultural and biological diversity, as well as recurrent patterns of interaction and exchange—has been historically constituted through intertwined processes of knowledge production, geopolitical interests, and circulation, in a region also traversed by one of the world’s major trade routes: the Panama Canal.

When: 23 June 2026, 16:15 (c.t.)
Where: Lecture Hall A109, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Marburg

All interested students and colleagues are warmly invited to attend!