Hi there!
My name is Adam. I’m going into my fourth year studying English literature, and am excited to be taking part in a seminar abroad for six weeks this summer in Peru, with the theme “Making and Unmaking Indigeneity in the Andes.” We will be thinking about and discussing how the notion of Indigeneity has been negotiated over time on the land, reading from a variety of disciplines including history, anthropology, political theory and literature. This blog is a record of my explorations of this and related topics, as I journey through Peru alongside my nineteen fellow classmates, our TA Daniel and our professor Jon Beasley-Murray. This will be a time of great change for me and many new experiences—this marks my first time traveling to South America, and somehow, my first time creating a blog (though, in an important sense, everything is a first).
I’m especially excited to visit the Andes and spend a month breathing mountain air, living around three thousand metres above sea level. I’m curious to see the histories we read and discuss manifested in space—how the region’s many cities and valleys have been (and continue to be) carved out and shaped by different traditions, conflicts, migrations and settlements. I know that, given the right attention, what we find will be so much greater and more fascinating than what we expect.
—I’ll see you all in Lima!