Staff profile

Paolo Fortis is a social anthropologist interested in material and visual forms and their place in people’s experiences across time and space. His research focus lies at the intersections between material and visual systems, art, ontology, personhood, temporality and historicity. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews and has conducted fieldwork with Guna people in Panama since 2003.

His first monograph Kuna Art and Shamanism: An Ethnographic Approach explores Guna anthropomorphic carvings in the context of the everyday life, focusing on the interplay between material and bodily practices, ecology, myth, the life cycle and the visual system. In placing Guna artefacts at the centre of a network of social relations that entangle people with nonhuman entities, the book argues that studying art ethnographically offers a vantage point into key aspects of social and cultural life. In showing connections with ritual artefacts made by other Indigenous peoples in South America, the book offers a new comparative avenue for the study of Amerindian art.

His subsequent research and publications have dealt with Amerindian visual and material systems and how they help gaining insights into notions of notions of power, alterity, changes in forms of sociality, the appropriation of foreign imagery and indigenous forms of temporality and historicity. He has become increasingly interested in how material and visual forms index time and act as means for reckoning with its fluctuations. This has brought him to study notions of the image in relation to temporality and how people navigate biographical and deep time through their engagement with material artefacts. Paolo co-edited, with Susanne Küchler, Time and its Object: A Perspective from Amerindian and Melanesian Societies on the Temporality of Images, where concerns over the temporal agency of images at different scales have been examined comparatively.

Paolo is currently writing a new book, Figurations of Time: The Visual and the Material in an Amerindian Historical Experience. The book shows how an analysis of objects and images sheds light on notions of time and history that a consideration of oral and written communication alone fails to grasp. How do images and objects help navigating biographical and deep time? How do they generate a sense of time that is inaccessible through other means? How do artefacts materialize a mosaic of temporalities that return complex figurations of time? Through a detailed ethnographic analysis of artefacts that are central to Guna lived experience, such as ritual woodcarvings and women’s decorated blouses, the book shows that objects are capable to generate complex and multi-layered images that articulate biographical, historical and deep time.

In 2023 Paolo and other colleagues at Durham funded the Special Interest Group in Indigenous Studies (SIGIS) that aims to provide a space for interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to establish a dialogue with indigenous scholars in academic research and teaching. This initiative was inspired by collaborations with Native and non-Native colleagues based in several museums, research centres and universities in the Northeast of the USA (e.g. Plimoth Patuxet and Mashuntucket Pequot Museum). These collaborations were at the core of the Anthropology Virtual Field Course that Paolo has taught with Gillian Bentley since 2022. The course deals with the colonial history of the region and builds on contemporary native studies and critical perspectives. It was recognized with a Teaching and Learning Award by Durham University in the category of Most Impactful Innovation in Teaching and Learning.

Since joining Durham in 2013 Paolo has collaborated with ethnographic and art museums. He was Guest Curator at the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich for the exhibition Mola – Crafting Beauty and Layering the World – in Panama (2015-2016) and provided a commentary to Abel Rodriguez’s exhibition at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2020).

 

 

Research interests

• Visual and Material Culture
• Anthropology of Art
• Indigenous Knowledge
• Amerindian Societies
• Personhood
• Shamanism
• Temporality
• Historicity

• Amerindian societies
• Anthropology of art
• Myth and history
• Panama
• Personhood
• Shamanism
• Social change
• Temporality

• 2022: Teaching and Learning Award: Virtual Field Course awarded T&L Award in the category of Most Impactful Innovation in Teaching and Learning
• 2019: Chair of the Anthropology of Art Committee:
• 2019: Member of the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme Panel:
• 2019: Editor of Anthropology & Art: Open-access publication series
• 2017: Winner of the J.B. Donne Essay Prize on the Anthropology of Art:

Authored book

• Fortis, P. (2013). Kuna Art and Shamanism: An Ethnographic Approach. University of Texas Press

Chapter in book

• Fortis, P., & Kuchler, S. (2021). Introduction. In P. Fortis, & S. Kuchler (Eds.), Time and Its Object: A Perspective from Amerindian and Melanesian Societies on the Temporality of Images (1-20). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003158806
• Fortis, P., & Kuchler, S. (2021). Biographical Relations in Amerindian and Melanesian Societies. In Time and Its Object: A Perspective from Amerindian and Melanesian Societies on the Temporality of Images (129-147). Routledge
• Fortis, P. (2018). Iconography and Style. In H. Callan (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Wiley & Sons Ltd
• Fortis, P. (2017). Corpo e Persona tra i Guna (Kuna) di Panama. In S. Botta, & M. Ferrara (Eds.), Corpi Sciamanici: La Nozione di Persona nello Studio dello Sciamanesimo (299-319). Edizioni Nuova Cultura
• Fortis, P. (2015). Smoking Tobacco and Swinging the Chicha: On Different Modes of Sociality among Guna ('Kuna') People. In A. Russell, & E. Rahman (Eds.), The master plant : tobacco in lowland South America (199-214). Bloomsbury
• Overing, J., Fortis, P., & Margiotti, M. (2015). Kinship in Anthropology. In J. Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (36-43). (2nd ed.). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-08-097086-8.12098-7
• Fortis, P., & Margiotti, M. (2015). Designs, Skills and Objects in Guna Life. In M. Flitsch (Ed.), Crafting beauty and layering the world in Panama (19-29). Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich
• Fortis, P. (2014). Artefacts and Bodies among Kuna People from Panamá. In E. Hallam, & T. Ingold (Eds.), Making and growing : anthropological studies of organisms and artefacts (89-106). Ashgate Publishing
• Fortis, P. (2011). Nuchu and kwaríp: Images of Past in Central and South America. In P. Fortis, & I. Praet (Eds.), The Archaeological Encounter. Anthropological Perspectives (204-235). University of St. Andrews (Centre for Amerindian, Latin American and Caribbean Studies)

Edited book

• Fortis, P., & Kuchler, S. (Eds.). (2021). Time and Its Object: A Perspective from Amerindian and Melanesian Societies on the Temporality of Images. Routlege
• Fortis, P., & Praet, I. (Eds.). (2011). The Archaeological Encounter. Anthropological Perspectives. Centre for Amerindian, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of St Andrews

Journal Article

• Fortis, P., & Margiotti, M. (2022). 'Too many meanings': Reading Piro Designs. Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 19(1), 31-38
• Fortis, P. (2021). Frequency, modulation, and time in Amerindian art. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 11(3), 1227-1230. https://doi.org/10.1086/717689
• Fortis, P. (2021). On the Multiple Temporalities of Guna Woodcarving
• Fortis, P. (2019). The aesthetics of 'time-reckoning': a Guna chromatic history. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 25(3), 441-466. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13077
• Fortis, P. (2017). Comment on 'Moral Sources and the Reproduction of the Amazonian Package' by Carlos David Londoño Sulkin. Current Anthropology, 58(4), 489-490. https://doi.org/10.1086/692783
• Fortis, P. (2016). General MacArthur among the Guna: The Aesthetics of Power and Alterity in an Amerindian Society. Current Anthropology, 57(4), 430-451. https://doi.org/10.1086/687112
• Fortis, P. (2013). O Nascimento do Desenho: uma Teoria Kuna do Corpo e da Pessoa. Revista Enfoques (Rio de Janeiro), 12(1), 66-93
• Fortis, P. (2012). Images of person in an Amerindian society. An ethnographic account of Kuna woodcarving. Journal de la Société des américanistes (En ligne), 98(1), 7-37. https://doi.org/10.4000/jsa.12119
• Fortis, P. (2010). The Birth of Design: a Kuna Theory of Body and Personhood. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16(3), 480-495. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01635.x
• Fortis, P. (2009). Nuchukana. Entalhe em madeira entre os Kuna do Panamá