Olivia Harris 1948 – 2009
April 21, 2009 by T’anta Wawa
Olivia’s influence in British anthropology and Latin American studies has been immense, but her contribution to thinking about Bolivia is perhaps even more significant. She carried out fieldwork in Ayllu Laymi, Norte de Potosi, and explored gender, landholding, cosmology and productivity. In the 1980s she published essays on gendered violence and reproduction that brought Andean realities into contact with feminist thought. Her background in philosophy and history gave her writing a framework of reference that made it pertinent and interesting far beyond anthropology, and she was also deeply interested in law and legal systems. Olivia’s influence, one suspects, was at the heart of many of the most interesting monographs to be written about the Andes and beyond in the last few years: Professor Les Back, for example, was one of her first supervisees.
