Heather Levi is an American anthropologist best known for her research in lucha libre. Levi was born in Massachusetts and became an Assistant professor of Anthropology at Temple University. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts in 1990 and went on to receive a PhD in Anthropology in 2001 from New York University. She currently lives in Philadelphia. She is currently doing research on street musicians in Condesa in Mexico City. Her research mainly focuses on performance practices, global and local contexts, and the political uses to which they are directed. Levi has performed ethnographic field work on lucha libre in Mexico City and the significance it has in the Mexican culture. Not only did she do ethnographic field work, but she also trained with a retired lucha libre wrestler and his students. Levi worked with this well respected wrestler for a year and a half and incorporated this as research into her book The World of Lucha Libre This allowed Levi to view lucha libre as an arena that examined the connections between ideas of mestizaje, class, gender, aesthetic values, mass mediation, and the state. This thus led her to write her …
Heather Levi
Author details
- Born:
- Feb. 3, 1962
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Heather Levi is an American anthropologist best known for her research in lucha libre. Levi was born in Massachusetts and became an Assistant professor of Anthropology at Temple University. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts in 1990 and went on to receive a PhD in Anthropology in 2001 from New York University. She currently lives in Philadelphia. She is currently doing research on street musicians in Condesa in Mexico City. Her research mainly focuses on performance practices, global and local contexts, and the political uses to which they are directed. Levi has performed ethnographic field work on lucha libre in Mexico City and the significance it has in the Mexican culture. Not only did she do ethnographic field work, but she also trained with a retired lucha libre wrestler and his students. Levi worked with this well respected wrestler for a year and a half and incorporated this as research into her book The World of Lucha Libre This allowed Levi to view lucha libre as an arena that examined the connections between ideas of mestizaje, class, gender, aesthetic values, mass mediation, and the state. This thus led her to write her book The World of Lucha Libra in which these ideas are explored. In a Los Angeles Times interview in 2009 she described lucha libre created a unique, cross-class "cultural phenomenon" that put on a "display of these larger-than-life heroes but heroes that everybody...knew [and] came from their social class."
