Magnus Pharao Hansen

Primary fields of research

• Indigenous peoples: politics, rights and selfdetermination
• Revitalization of endangered languages
• Nationalism, cultural heritage and language policy
• Education and language policy
• Mesoamerican Languages: Uto-Aztecan, Otomanguean, Nahuatl dialectology
• Descriptive linguistics: Nahuatl (morphology, Syntax, pragmatics), otomi (space, deixis, kinship terminology)
• History and the representation of indigenous peoples and cultural heritage
• Wikipedia and the representation of indigenous peoples and politics

Short presentation

My research focuses on the relations between indigenous politics and the revitalization of endangered minority languages. I work primarily with the Nahuatl language, but also with Otomi. I have studied how language revitalization relates to indigenous political mobilization in Mexico, and how it relates to ideologies of race, cultural heritage and ethnic mobilization in the US Southwest. I also study language history, focusing on the pre-colonial histories of Mesoamerican indigenous languages which I study through the methods of historical linguistics combined with data fom archeology and genetics.

Current research

My ongoing research project is supported by an individual post doc grant from the Danish Council for Independent research. 

Race, Nation, Language and Culture in the Aztlan borderlands

The research project explores how Chicano people in California increasingly reject the ethno-racial categorization as "Latinos" and instead re-categorize themselves as indigenous, Native Americans, taking up elements of Mexican indigenous cultural heritage such as the indigenous Nahuatl language and aspects of indigenous religion. Through ethnographic research among members of the "Mexica movement" in Southern California and Mexico, the project investigates how ideologies, discourses, social relations and life experiences motivate this ethnic reclassification, as well as the tensions between different ideologies within the movement, and tensions between the Mexica movement and other indigenous groups in the US and Mexico. The wider aim is to use the data to inform a general theory of ethnic identity based on a semiotic approach to subjectivity formation, working to understand the social and subjective process that lead to radical shifts in identity.