Edward Murphy | Michigan State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Edward Murphy

Critical Historical Studies, 2024

This article develops how the 2019 social uprising in Chile linked anti-neoliberal and anti-autho... more This article develops how the 2019 social uprising in Chile linked anti-neoliberal and anti-authoritarian causes with those dedicated to social justice in race, environmental, indigenous, labor, gender, and sex relations. Protestors, moreover, articulated their visions for change in public squares and settings. In identifying these characteristics, the article asserts that the protest movement should be understood as being both capacious and territorial. These two characteristics, moreover, have long characterized the Chilean Left and made it well suited to take advantage of the present protest conjuncture. Yet if capaciousness and territoriality have granted vibrancy and possibility to the protest movement, they nonetheless have also presented it with significant challenges. This includes the fact that seizing territory, often including the destruction of property, helped to delegitimize the protests among right-wing sectors and broader publics. The article thus ultimately underscores the promise and shortcomings afforded by leftist forms of street protest.

Cuadernso de Teoría Social, 2023

An American anthropologist and historian develops how his interpretations of the dictatorship and... more An American anthropologist and historian develops how his interpretations of the dictatorship and its legacies have changed while working in the poblaciones of Santiago de Chile during the last thirty years. The coup, the violations of the dictatorship, and the effects of neoliberalism have had particularly powerful and violent effects on pobladores and in their efforts to improve their housing and living conditions. Nonetheless, a perspective that only views the coup through the lens of rupture and change loses an understanding of certain continuities and complexities in the trajectory of the poblaciones, including an understanding of the heterogeneity of their inhabitants and the importance of private property in their lives. The article emphasizes the importance of a dual perspective in interpretations of the development of the poblaciones in the last fifty years, one that not only writes against the horrific effects of the dictatorship, but also resists viewing the dictatorship as the singular motor of Chilean history since 1973.

Stretching back to the 1950s, interdisciplinary work between anthropology and history has taken d... more Stretching back to the 1950s, interdisciplinary work between anthropology and history has taken diverse expressions. Yet it has developed with more coherence since the 1980s, largely in response to the declining promise of global modernity and the rise of poststructuralism and deconstructionism. Through a critical and contemporary engagement with this wave of scholarship, this volume challenges readers to think of work at the crossroads of anthropology and history as transdisciplinary and anthrohistorical, moving beyond a partial integration of the disciplines as it critically evaluates their assumptions and trajectories.

American Anthropologist, 2014

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2022

This paper analyzes a housing project in Santiago, Chile that now lies in ruins and has become a ... more This paper analyzes a housing project in Santiago, Chile that now lies in ruins and has become a contested memory site. The project was once an ambitious, modernist project that housed former squatters during Salvador Allende’s socialist presidency (1970-1973) and its demise has subsequently become emblematic of the violent processes of neoliberal urban restructuring that marked the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Yet efforts to memorialize the site also contain within them certain silences and elisions, gaps which can help to reveal the complex, embedded nature of liberal property relations in Chile. These relations underscore certain dynamics through which squatters have historically been able to gain housing rights and a foothold in the city. They also provide a key location through which to better understand the specific contours of neoliberalism’s trajectory, including its haunted forms of ruination, its points of tension, its limits, and the making of its counterpublics.

One mother's deportation to her native Honduras reflects how the U.S. immigration regime not only... more One mother's deportation to her native Honduras reflects how the U.S. immigration regime not only separates families, but impels them to migrate to the United States in the first place.

The United States has long been home to exclusionary immigration policies. Under the Trump admin... more The United States has long been home to exclusionary immigration policies. Under the Trump administration, the hardline position that deems undocumented immigrants criminals defines immigration enforcement operations, with ICE calling the shots.

By Chandra D. Bhimull, Edward Murphy, and Monica Eileen Patterson. “A Prefatory Piece.” In Anthro... more By Chandra D. Bhimull, Edward Murphy, and Monica Eileen Patterson. “A Prefatory Piece.” In Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline, edited by Edward Murphy, David William Cohen, Chandra D. Bhimull, Fernando Coronil, Monica Eileen Patterson, and Julie Skurski, pp 3-10. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011.

Books by Edward Murphy

Introduction and first chapter from For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chi... more Introduction and first chapter from For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010, by Edward Murphy, © 2015. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Critical Historical Studies, 2024

This article develops how the 2019 social uprising in Chile linked anti-neoliberal and anti-autho... more This article develops how the 2019 social uprising in Chile linked anti-neoliberal and anti-authoritarian causes with those dedicated to social justice in race, environmental, indigenous, labor, gender, and sex relations. Protestors, moreover, articulated their visions for change in public squares and settings. In identifying these characteristics, the article asserts that the protest movement should be understood as being both capacious and territorial. These two characteristics, moreover, have long characterized the Chilean Left and made it well suited to take advantage of the present protest conjuncture. Yet if capaciousness and territoriality have granted vibrancy and possibility to the protest movement, they nonetheless have also presented it with significant challenges. This includes the fact that seizing territory, often including the destruction of property, helped to delegitimize the protests among right-wing sectors and broader publics. The article thus ultimately underscores the promise and shortcomings afforded by leftist forms of street protest.

Cuadernso de Teoría Social, 2023

An American anthropologist and historian develops how his interpretations of the dictatorship and... more An American anthropologist and historian develops how his interpretations of the dictatorship and its legacies have changed while working in the poblaciones of Santiago de Chile during the last thirty years. The coup, the violations of the dictatorship, and the effects of neoliberalism have had particularly powerful and violent effects on pobladores and in their efforts to improve their housing and living conditions. Nonetheless, a perspective that only views the coup through the lens of rupture and change loses an understanding of certain continuities and complexities in the trajectory of the poblaciones, including an understanding of the heterogeneity of their inhabitants and the importance of private property in their lives. The article emphasizes the importance of a dual perspective in interpretations of the development of the poblaciones in the last fifty years, one that not only writes against the horrific effects of the dictatorship, but also resists viewing the dictatorship as the singular motor of Chilean history since 1973.

Stretching back to the 1950s, interdisciplinary work between anthropology and history has taken d... more Stretching back to the 1950s, interdisciplinary work between anthropology and history has taken diverse expressions. Yet it has developed with more coherence since the 1980s, largely in response to the declining promise of global modernity and the rise of poststructuralism and deconstructionism. Through a critical and contemporary engagement with this wave of scholarship, this volume challenges readers to think of work at the crossroads of anthropology and history as transdisciplinary and anthrohistorical, moving beyond a partial integration of the disciplines as it critically evaluates their assumptions and trajectories.

American Anthropologist, 2014

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2022

This paper analyzes a housing project in Santiago, Chile that now lies in ruins and has become a ... more This paper analyzes a housing project in Santiago, Chile that now lies in ruins and has become a contested memory site. The project was once an ambitious, modernist project that housed former squatters during Salvador Allende’s socialist presidency (1970-1973) and its demise has subsequently become emblematic of the violent processes of neoliberal urban restructuring that marked the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Yet efforts to memorialize the site also contain within them certain silences and elisions, gaps which can help to reveal the complex, embedded nature of liberal property relations in Chile. These relations underscore certain dynamics through which squatters have historically been able to gain housing rights and a foothold in the city. They also provide a key location through which to better understand the specific contours of neoliberalism’s trajectory, including its haunted forms of ruination, its points of tension, its limits, and the making of its counterpublics.

One mother's deportation to her native Honduras reflects how the U.S. immigration regime not only... more One mother's deportation to her native Honduras reflects how the U.S. immigration regime not only separates families, but impels them to migrate to the United States in the first place.

The United States has long been home to exclusionary immigration policies. Under the Trump admin... more The United States has long been home to exclusionary immigration policies. Under the Trump administration, the hardline position that deems undocumented immigrants criminals defines immigration enforcement operations, with ICE calling the shots.

By Chandra D. Bhimull, Edward Murphy, and Monica Eileen Patterson. “A Prefatory Piece.” In Anthro... more By Chandra D. Bhimull, Edward Murphy, and Monica Eileen Patterson. “A Prefatory Piece.” In Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline, edited by Edward Murphy, David William Cohen, Chandra D. Bhimull, Fernando Coronil, Monica Eileen Patterson, and Julie Skurski, pp 3-10. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011.

Introduction and first chapter from For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chi... more Introduction and first chapter from For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010, by Edward Murphy, © 2015. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.