Dear Anthropology Community,  

We are utterly devastated to share the sudden passing of Maria Fernanda Esteban Palma, known as Mafe, on November 27th. Mafe earned her PhD in cultural anthropology from Penn in 2017.  Many had the privilege of knowing her as a scholar, teacher, and mentor, and many had the joy of knowing her as a friend.   

A GoFundMe account has been set up by her husband, Ding, to offset legal and burial costs: https://www.gofundme.com/f/en-memoria-de-mara-fernanda-esteban.  Please feel free to share this. 

There will be an online zoom memorial this coming Saturday, December 11th, from 9am PT/12pm ET/6pm Spain time. Please contact Meaghan Rubel at rubel@sas.upenn.edu for more information. 

Meaghan is also coordinating a collection of letters and pictures for Mafe's young daughter. Should you wish to contribute any memories, photos, or thoughts, please feel free to reach out to her at rubel@sas.upenn.edu 

Some words from those who knew Mafe during her time at Penn: 

Dr. Maria Fernanda Esteban Palma was a graduate student here within the Department of Anthropology of the University of Pennsylvania from 2011 to 2017 when she received her PhD. Her dissertation - "Branding the Muisca-Self: Indigenous Sincerity Amidst Colombian Multicultural Coloniality" - is publicly accessible at this link: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3014/ 

Maria was a strong and very intelligent ethnographer – she knew how to work with people and create an environment of trust and interaction. For her dissertation research, Maria developed an important anthropological study of the Muisca Indians in Colombia. These indigenous groups are in the process of asserting their identities and presence by creating a framework for the resurgence of ‘prehispanic spiritual traditions.’ This approach to the recreation of ‘spiritual traditions’ is interesting on several fronts: first, the indigenous people are establishing new protocols for self-identification; second, they are utilizing prehispanic archaeological sites as the basis for their identity; and third, they are utilizing public performance as a means to assert their continuing presence. 

Maria’s work, therefore, took on a set of interesting cultural questions related to: 

1. indigeneity and how Indigenous identities are made visible within societies today? 

2. revitalization – how might a process of revitalization work as it relates to indigenous peoples? Must there be a physical component related to the heritage and indigenous identity of the past? 

3. heritage – how is heritage identified by revitalizing groups to make their claim? And how is this heritage contested by others? 

Maria worked with several emerging Muisca groups in Columbia for her dissertation project. Maria spent 12-15 months (2015-2016) in Colombia working intensively with two Muisca groups and interacting with several others. The questions she examined in Columbia about identity, indigeneity, and rights are equally valid for US culture today, for Mexican culture today, and for many societies where marginalized ethnic identities at risk of erasure by the state are being re-asserted and reassessed. 

Following her dissertation, Maria and family moved to the UK and she became one of the first Project Curators for the Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research at The British Museum. She and I had discussed possible collaborative projects in Belize connected to indigenous communities and past British Museum expeditions. 

Richard M. Leventhal 

Maria-Fernanda conducted her research on an urban indigenous revitalization movement on the outskirts of Bogota, asking questions regarding the meanings of state recognition – legally and affectively – within the contemporary neoliberal moment, but also interrogating what it means to claim indigeneity within urban Latin America, a setting usually understood as characteristically mestizo.  She investigated the complex relationships among indigenous “players” within the movement (where these movements are ordinarily understood as rurally based), and between Muisca groups and other actors on the urban scene, such as other non-indigenous “urbanized peasants” (her term), developers, and upper middle-class Colombians interested in spiritual and other forms of “authenticity.”  She paid particular attention to the kinds of cultural practices that were being targeted, how these practices were being linked to particular places, and the mechanisms through which these practices were being authenticated.  She also focused on the kinds of conflicts that arose between newly recognized groups and non-indigenous persons, thinking through the various ways in which processes of assimilation have been related to the ideological foundations of nation building.   

To ask these sorts of questions, Maria-Fernanda used a multi-sited network-based methodology for her study to map not only the ways Muisca people in different urban locales were tracking their own heritage practices but also to understand the effects and circulation of transnational indigenous movements, both within and beyond Colombia.  She thus raised important conceptual questions about how authenticity and relationality are constructed, as well as about the complex ideologies that have traditionally linked land (or a connection to it) with notions of indigeneity.  What was fascinating about her project, therefore, had to do with its departure from more commonly understood paradigms of indigenous revitalization movements, and this is where Maria Fernanda’s theoretical interventions lie.  She argued that urban indigenous persons in Colombia were part of a branding initiative through which they were able to advance their own interests through openings established by the Colombian state through constitutional reform, but toward ends that did not necessarily dovetail with the objectives of the state.  Tracking indigenous self-making over time and through a decolonial theoretical framework allowed her to position the indigenous communities with whom she worked as dynamically responding to changing conditions, and as collectively debating and negotiating already-existing images and representations of indigeneity, spirituality, and rights-based politics.   

Deborah A. Thomas 

In addition to her Penn Ph.D., Dr. Maria Fernanda Esteban Palma held a law degree from the National University in Columbia, and a Master of Arts degree in archaeology from the University of Exeter. Starting in 2019, she served as Project Curator for the "Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research" in the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the British Museum. Here are some links that demonstrate that work: 
 

Museum collection survey: "Matching-up the Muisca past and present: Virtual cultural heritage": https://www.sdcelarbritishmuseum.org/matching-up-the-muisca-past-and-present-virtual-cultural-heritage/ 
 

On-line seminar: “If you can smell it, hear it and feel it, then you are indigenous - Sensorial affectation and agentic realism as applied to the analysis of Indigenous formation processes in central Columbia: https://www.ub.edu/artsoundscapes/artsoundscapes-seminar-16/ 
 

Paper published in 2020: "Parte 1: Arqueologías y etnicidades muiscas. Capítulo 1: Etnogénesis y diversidad: el resurgimiento muisca en el territorio “mestizo” del centro de Colombia": https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Parte-1%3A-Arqueolog%C3%ADas-y-etnicidades-muiscas.-1%3A-y-Palma/90f41968f4560b4bc95569750e216b499021d249 
 

Contributor to "Mapping a New Museum - Politics and Practice of Latin American Research with the British Museum," edited by Laura Osorio Sunnucks, Jago Cooper, and María Miranda, London: Routledge Press 2021. Co-author of chapter "Genocide Collections at the British Museum: House of Shadows, Basket of Seeds": https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003162704-27/genocide-collections-british-museum-house-shadows-basket-seeds-oscar-rom%C3%A1n-romualdo-jitjudtjaa%C3%B1o-alicia-s%C3%A1nchez-de-romualdo-juan-alvaro-echeverri-ana-maytik-avirama-laura-osorio-sunnucks-mar%C3%ADa-mercedes-mart%C3%ADnez-milantch%C3%AD-mar%C3%ADa-fernanda-esteban-palma?context=ubx&refId=f3d9f9e1-efcb-4e1d-b004-50a929b71c28 

Margaret M. Bruchac