sNAPAshots: Alberto Bouroncle

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Transcript

Interviewer 0:00
[Onscreen NAPA Logo] Welcome to sNAPAshots conversations with practicing, professional and applied anthropologists. Let’s meet Alberto Bouroncle. How did you get interested in anthropology?

Alberto Bouroncle 0:21
I know I was interested in anthropology from from early age, but I couldn’t verbalize it, because I didn’t know what anthropology was. But I was the kind of young, young kid that would love to read history, that would love to read about other cultures, other countries. I was fascinated just by first, by seeing pictures of landscapes in which there were snow. Wow, we don’t have a snow in Peru. Well, we have but up in the Andes. And I’m from Lima, and when I was growing up, I never saw snow. So it was utterly interesting to me, even watching TV and seeing different characters that will come from different parts of the world immediately draw my attention. So I was very much and besides, I always wanted to know why this happened. Why is this country so far away from the UK or from England speaking English? I mean, this kind of question I will keep asking my parents, and they were kind of tired of me asking those kind of questions, so…

Interviewer 1:24
How has the anthropological perspective or training enhanced your contribution to your workplace?

Alberto Bouroncle 1:31
We as anthropologists have a value. We have something to offer to businesses or other kind of enterprises. We are kind of the bridge between the local and the global. And being not only a bridge in a sense that we communicate those two worlds, we can call it like that, but that bridge is full of theories, is full of methods, is full of approaches and and techniques to be able to interpret, analyze and figure out what makes societies different, but also, and very importantly, what makes society similar. Some anthropologists like to focus on the differences, but for me, also, it was as interesting as it is, I always wanted to look for what, what are the commonalities? So, like a little bit of a Levi Strauss kind of approach, you know, the incest taboo being something that is across all cultures. Is there a way in which this culture represent this in a different way that we don’t realize but we can figure it out. Enhance my interest in symbolic anthropology, because I think it’s in the world of symbols in which we can see the real wants of a society, the real what do, what do they want to achieve, is many times hidden in a symbolic way. And I think anthropology, anthropology in general, the anthropological approaches and studies make you be more observant, to see, to analyze rituals, myths, another thing that explains society, and something I really like about studying rituals. And I remember this phrase because it’s an amazing phrase, “rituals turn the obligatory into the desirable” meaning you can use rituals to create a unified society, and that, for me, has been very interesting, and something that I’ve been able to carry with me in different jobs,

Interviewer 3:38
Was there a moment that changed the way you practiced anthropology?

Alberto Bouroncle 3:43
I was a student in college, but I had the opportunity to do field work. Three months field work in the Andes in Peru, very, very high there was alpaca shepherd in Peru, and this was a very difficult time for my country. It was, we are we were basically having a civil war. We have a shining path. Back then, a Maoist organization that wanted to basically have a war against the state, against the government, and take over under a Maoist regime. And well, we were sent there to that community, and we didn’t know. We just were sent to go, we have connections. I said, Yeah, you can go to this particular community of alpaca shepherds, and you can do fieldwork. And our idea was to provide do some sort of capacity building back then. I mean, we’re talking about early 80s, so long time ago, no internet, no cell phone, no nothing. And these people didn’t have a way to communicate to each other. They didn’t have a newspaper or anything similar to it. So we actually bought a silk screen. And we create. We help them create the first newspaper of the community, just you realizing the most basic elements of silk screen printing. And it was, it was fascinating, these four who were fascinated by it, but at the same time, we were put under a lot of pressure, because we realized that the person that was the host where we were living, he was very much an ally of the leader of this guerrilla movement. So it was a tough, very tough situation, because we were in the middle, I mean, we were in proposals of civil war in Peru or anything like that. But on the other hand, we were being the guest of this individual who was great guy, but he was always telling us, comrades, the war from the countryside to the cities, we’re going to take the cities we look at themselves well, I guess I mean, we didn’t know what to respond because the political mess was so strong. But something I learned living with people in communities, living with people that really live close to a land that they are the most generous people in the world. They have nothing. They have cows that were skeletal. There are. There was a draught in the region back then. So the alpacas wool wasn’t of good quality, because the kind of pasture the alpacas eat reflects the kind of wool they produce. So it was bad. I mean, bad over bad over bad. Yet they will share everything they have. Their meals were basically potato soup on a daily basis. I mean, the lack of protein was staggering, and these folk will share every little thing with us. It was incredible. I mean, the generosity of these people was out of the world. And I it taught me that to create trust, you, you, you are, you have to engage with people in a way in which this trust will never be broken. Because, I mean, it takes, it takes a long time to create trust, it takes a second to destroy. So we were very, very, very committed. And I learned a big lesson there, as as I was having so much hunger living there and seeing these people sharing, sharing their food, sharing everything they have, despite the fact that they were super hard workers. And it was a big, big lesson, and it was also an opportunity to learn about leadership in those communities and how you to respect the leaders of those communities. The way we came to that community was university students coming from Lima. We’re almost local. We were tourists. Some people call us gringos, even if we were in our own country, because we’re in the country and we were people from the city. But, you know, by having conversation, by engaging, by providing something of value to the community, you start creating this trust, and you start, you know, generating useful conversations that will take you somewhere. And that was, that was a key moment which I it made it told me you are in the right path. You choose the right profession for you.

Interviewer 8:35
What advice would you like to pass on to future anthropologists seeking rles and professional fields?

Alberto Bouroncle 8:41
The way you communicate with practitioners, the way in which, because practitioners also come from different backgrounds, and as an anthropologist, I think facilitate you to have conversation with people with different backgrounds, not only, not only professional backgrounds, but cultural, social, etc, socioeconomic backgrounds, so I think it opens a lot of doors.

Interviewer 9:05
Thank you, Alberto, for sharing your experience as a practicing professional and applied anthropologist. For more snNAPAshots, find us@practicinganthropology.org LinkedIn, meta and X

Credits 9:17
PRODUCED BY Niel Tashima Cathleen Crain Joshua Liggett
DIRECTED BY Reshama Damle Suanna Crowley
EDITED BY Whitney Margaritis
MUSIC “Background Music” by Fae Spencer via Pixabay
ADDITIONAL FOOTAGE VIA PEXELS BY Adrien JACTA, cottonbro studio, Florian Delee, Jaoa Pavese, Karoline Kaboompics, Kelly, Los Muertos Crew, Maksim Romashkin, Michael Burrows, Mikhail Nilov, Pavel Danilyuk, Pixabay, Taryn Elliot, Yan Krukau
CREATIVE ASSISSTANT Juana Lozano

Many Thanks to NAPA’s Governing Council for supporting sNAPAshots Conversations with Practicing, Professional, and Applied Anthropologists NAPA is a section of the American Anthropological Association NAPA is seeking volunteers to join the sNAPAshots project. We’d love to hear from YOU! Contact us at: ntashima@ ltgassociates.com

Alberto Bouroncle 9:18
[Outtakes] When I work in Finland for Nordic Council for Alcohol and Drug Research. They were thrilled to have an anthropologist from South America working in Finland. I was a rarity, for sure, but I did notice that they appreciate my perspective, because it was a perspective that they didn’t have. They have more a more quantitative perspective. It was very interesting to see that bringing another perspective make the our approach so much richer, and also the fact that the Nordic society were started to become more plural, more diverse then. So the need for understanding other cultures, other forms of social organization, not only those that are outside of your country, but those that start growing in your own country, became a very powerful element in my work in Finland.

Interviewer 10:17
[Onscreen NAPA Logo] sNAPAhots.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai