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Dr Arij Ouweneel

Associate Professor
Research Theme: History
Tel. +31 20 525 3246 / 3498; Fax +31 20 625 5127
Office hours: Mondays from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m.

Arij Ouweneel has been Associate Professor at CEDLA since 1985, and was Special Professor of Historical Anthropology of the Amerindian Peoples at the Universiteit Utrecht from 1999 to 2004. He graduated cum laude in Social-Economic History at the Universiteit Leiden in 1983 and received his PhD cum laude in Social-Economic History at the same university in 1989.

New Book: Freudian fadeout. The failings of psychoanalysis in film criticism

In Western culture, the psychoanalysis that has guided popular psychology for almost a century is now on the retreat. Better equipped with proven results, cognitive and evolutionary psychology has driven psychoanalysis out of the spotlight. In cultural and film studies, however, the debate between cognitive sciences and psychoanalysis remains contentious. This volume explores this state of things by examining criticism of 18 films, juxtaposing them with cognitive-based films to reveal the flaws in the psychoanalytical concepts. It pays particular attention to simulation theory, the concept that narratives "learned" from films could work in human minds as simulations for solutions to particular problems. By introducing the idea of narrative stimulation to film studies, this work argues for a different method of film critique, encouraging further research into this nascent field. More information

Research interests

Ouweneel's main research project for the period 2009-2013 is based on a few fundamental questions: What if the current crisis in the role of the Latin America State, with the rise of non-elite politicians, bottom-up democratization, intensifying social conflicts and violence, were in fact a crisis involving the ability to represent the world Latin Americans live in? What if its roots cause were their ability to conceive of their society as a source of positive values? And what if the media were both the source and the vehicle of that representation? Working with moving images — film, television, Internet — the object of the third project of the research line is to identify the type of crisis — or indeed its weathering — depicted throughout the vast corpus of the Latin American moving image, and, at the same time, to contribute to the theory of Latin American encoding processes. This project looks at moving image narratives in selected Latin American countries. Central is to investigate the so-called anchors of public and fictive narratives of everyday life in Latin American “commonsense knowledge.”

The local actors of this project are both writers and directors of Latin American movies as well as journalists. Here, the most useful crossover between cultural analysis, semiotics and social science work on belonging occurs through the Ecological Schema Theory. In this, films and television broadcasting programmes are studied as the major source of contemporary historical microanalysis in order to understand the ideas encoded in the scripts and films as well as the perception that the viewers and audience could have had in decoding them. Connecting these methodological fields and disciplines enables the micro-historian to enhance the understanding of how the selected public expressions, such as used in films, narrate the transformations in the essential sense of belonging in the era of globalisation of the Latin American nation. The films are privileged and selected on their explicit or implicit narration of everyday identities. Other sources will be used to understand the social-cultural context of this narration and to weigh the findings from “real life” against fiction.

Ouweneel concentrates on writing books, which is a time consuming way of disseminating research activities but inevitable due to the complexities involved. One book discusses the so-called Freudian Excuse in the production and reception of feature films. The Freudian Edifice, in ruins today, has from the outset been popular in North America and Europa among the cultural elites but seems remarkably absent in current Latin American filming and cultural critique — with a few noteworthy exceptions. Another book discusses the reception of Andean migrant culture in the formerly culturally “White” city of Lima. Painters and filmmakers, mostly belonging to higher upper classes, have difficulties in integrating the new popular cultural hegemony of the city — choloficación — in their specific works of art. This project underscores recent critiques on the classical idea that elites decide the course of cultural developments. A third book concentrates on the context of the concept of the “indigenous,” in past and present, as represented in older and contemporary feature films by several Latin American filmmakers. The argument defends the position that there is no general definition of “indigenous” to be found in these films. Also included in the near future is a discussion of the representation of child adoption in the moving image, articulated to the recent lawsuits against former leaders of the Argentine dictatorship.

Selected publications: Monographs and lectures of Dr Arij Ouweneel

— Freudian fadeout: The failings of psychoanalysis in film criticism (Jefferson: Mcfarland. Available Spring/Summer 2012). More information

— Shadows over Anáhuac. An Ecological Interpretation of Crisis and Development in Central Mexico, 1730-1800 (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1996).

— Ciclos interrumpidos. Ensayos sobre historia rural mexicana. Siglos XVIII-XIX (México, El Colegio Mexiquense, 1998)

— Las tierras de los pueblos de indios en el altiplano de Méxixo, 1560-1920. Una aportación teórica interpretativa (Amsterdam, Cuadernos del CEDLA 1, 1998) [met Rik Hoekstra].

— Platgetreden paden. Over het erfgoed van de Indianen. Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van Bijzonder Hoogleraar, Utrecht 14 januari 2000 (Amsterdam Cuadernos del CEDLA 6, 2000)

— The Psychology of the Faceless Warriors. Eastern Chiapas, Early 1994 (Amsterdam Cuadernos del CEDLA Ns 10, 2002)

— The Flight of the Shepherd. Microhistory and the Psychology of Cultural Resilience in Bourbon Central Mexico (Amsterdam, CEDLA Latin America Studies 93, 2005).

— Terug naar Macondo. Het spook van Honderd jaar eenzaamheid en het inheemse innerlijk van de mesties (Amsterdam, Rozenberg Publishers, 2007).

Please click here for the complete publications list of Dr Arij Ouweneel