About

Lagalisse is an anthropologist of social movements, heteronymic writer, popular educator, and visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.

Lagalisse is the author of Occult Features of Anarchism – With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples (2019), an intersectional study of anarchist social movements that also comments on the cultural production of “conspiracy theory”. Published on the eve of the pandemic, translations led to new ethnography of contemporary counterculture so far found in e.g. The Crypto-Utopian Occult Revival and Anti/Fascism (2024) & Beware the Psychedelic Metaverse (2024).

Among Lagalisse’s publications find also “On Authenticity: Intersections of Race and Class in Consensus Process and Beyond” (2024) in the Rivista di antropologia contemporanea, the Chapter on “Anthropology” in The SAGE Handbook of Marxism (2022), eds. Sara Farris, Alberto Toscano, Beverley Skeggs, and Svenja Bromberg , “The Dangers of Health and Safety: Marijuana Legalization as Frontier Capitalism” (2018) in Journal of Ethnobiology, and longstanding earlier pieces such as “Marginalizing Magdalena”: Intersections of Gender and the Secular in Anarchoindigenist Solidarity Activism. (2011) Signs – Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Vol 36, No. 3; and “Gossip as Direct Action” (2013) in Contesting Publics: Feminism, Activism, Ethnography, Eds. Sally Cole and Lynne Phillips. London: Pluto.

Lagalisse’s PhD dissertation, “Good Politics”: Property, Intersectionality, and the Making of the Anarchist Self (2016), currently undergoing revisions for publication, explores anarchist networks that cross Québec, the United States and Mexico to examine contradictions within indigenous solidarity activism and settler “anarchoindigenism”. The ethnography throws into relief the idiosyncracies of university-educated Anglo-American leftists, and draws on anthropological, feminist and critical race theory to show how they have preempted the black feminist challenge of “intersectionality” by recuperating its praxis within the logic of neoliberal self-making projects and property relations. (The “Anthropology” entry in the Handbook of Marxism is the best summary of this work published so far.)

While completing her PhD in Social Anthropology (2017) at McGill University in Montreal, Canada (supervisor: Kristin Norget), Lagalisse also held a visiting researcher appointment at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social (CIESAS) in Oaxaca, Mexico (supervisor: Margarita Dalton), and a U.S.-Canada Fulbright Fellowship at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at the University of Texas at Austin (supervisor: Charles Hale). Lagalisse also held doctoral scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (FRQSC), as well as a postdoctoral research grant from the FQRSC while she developed Occult Features of Anarchism (2019) at the International Inequalities Institute of the London School of Economics, under the supervision of sociologist Beverley Skeggs.

See full bibliography complete with links to PDFs.

Listen to podcasts.

See information and writings in Spanish.

Lagalisse’s profile at the International Inequalities Institute of the London School of Economics.

Contact: erica.lagalisse@mail.mcgill.ca

Twitter: @ELagalisse

Instagram: ericalagalisse

Facebook: Erica Lagalisse