DrLuis Angosto Ferrandez

PhD Queen's University of Belfast, MPhil University College Cork, BA (Licenciatura) Universidad de Granada

Luis is a teacher and researcher in Anthropology and Spanish & Latin American Studies. He has extensive fieldwork experience in Latin America and Spain. In Venezuela he started conducting fieldwork in 2003 and has since spent over a decade living, working, and researching there. In addition to his scholarly work, he is a contributor to various public media outlets.

His first book, Venezuela Reframed (Zed, 2015), provided the first diachronic analysis of the formation of a social movement in Bolivarian Venezuela. With a focus on the indigenous movement, the book theorises the emergence of “state-supporting” social movements, showing the political synergies that unite some state actors and large sectors of the indigenous population in pursuit of socio-economic enfranchisement.

Luis’s new book project, entitled Property in Paradise, is a historical ethnography of the production of space, property relations and class formation in Southern Venezuela. In this work, he builds on the concepts “modern accumulation” and “defetishisation of environments” to shed light on the sociocultural dynamics and outcomes of a process of land enclosure that is transforming radically the lives of the inhabitants of that region.

In another ongoing project, Luis is studying the usage of national symbols in contemporary political scenarios. Grounding this study in anthropological theory on political communication and behaviour in periods of social instability, he contributes to debates about the distinctive foundations of democratic and authoritarian ideals and the social conditions that enable their realisation. As part of this project, he has coordinated the first comparative exploration of usages and functions of national flags in Spain and Latin America (with contributions published in AIBR, 2022).

In the early 2010s, Luis also co-coordinated pioneering comparative studies of race and ethnic categorisation in Latin American censuses. His co-edited volumes Everlasting Countdowns (2012) and The Politics of Identity in Latin American Censuses (2016, originally published as a special issue of JILAR [2014]) set theoretical foundations for scholars who have subsequently approached this area of research. Building on those projects, Luis recently completed a small project exploring understandings of race, mestizaje, and criollismo among blind people in Chile and Venezuela (published in LARR, 2025). This project demonstrates that visually perceived markers are not self-evidently constitutive of race as a social category and enables a reconsideration of how different notions of admixture continue to permeate ideals of personhood and social relations in Latin American countries.

Editorial work is an important part of Luis’s academic experience. This includes membership in the boards of Latin American Perspectives (Participating Editor) and two open-access anthropology journals that publish primarily in Spanish: AIBR and Antropologías del Sur.

Luis was born in Villarrobledo (Spain) and has personally experienced the positive results that solid state investment in public education and health systems can generate. His primary and secondary schooling took place in his local public institutions, and his BA degree was also obtained at a public University in Spain. When he needed to visit doctors, he was able to attend clinics and hospitals that did not make patients pay fees when leaving the premises. He is married and has two sons, and for their and other kids’ future he’d very much like to see strong public services supporting civic citizenship growth in our societies.