Chris Batterman Cháirez

Chris Batterman Cháirez is an ethnographer, anthropologist, and ethnomusicologist from Mexico City. His work deals with the intercalations of music, difference, and power in Latin America and, broadly speaking, with the politics of sound. He thinks about the ways music reveals latent registers of feeling, sense, and history; and sound’s intersections with media and technology, law and governance, movement and migration, and other dimensions of social life. His long-term ethnographic research commitments are in Michoacán, Mexico, and he also works in Mexico City and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

His current book project, Pirekua’s Traces, is an ethnography of pirekua, an Indigenous P’urhépecha song form from Michoacán, and the political machinations of liberal multiculturalism in contemporary Mexico. Specifically, the book takes pirekua as an entryway to understand the ways in which the weight of multicultural governance is experienced and inhabited by subjects marked as Indigenous. The book is an account of power and the shapes it takes in Indigenous Mexico, and about the production of social difference and indigeneity in multicultural states. He is also working on a second monograph called Blood and Cinder, an ethnography of popular media, cartel violence, and the “bellicose ordinary” in western Mexico.

He was a professional musician in a past life and has lived and worked as a musician in Atlanta, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro. He has performed, toured, and recorded in a variety of styles with artists from the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Korea. He received a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago.