Eliane Karp
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Eliane Karp (born 1955), a French-born anthropologist and economist, is the wife of the former[update] president of Peru, Alejandro Toledo, with whom she has a daughter, Chantal.
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[edit] Early life
Eliane Chantal Karp Fernenbug was born in Paris. As a teen, she was a member of the left-wing youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, and lived briefly on a kibbutz in Israel.
She studied economics at the Lycee Francais in Brussels, and in 1971 moved to Israel and specialized in Latin American Studies and earned her B.A. in anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She subsequently traveled to the United States to do her Master's and Ph.D. in anthropology at Stanford University, with a minor in Finance and "Economy of Development". At Stanford, she met Toledo and married him in 1979. Karp first came to Peru in the late 1970s to study Indian (indigenous) communities while working on her Ph.D.
She worked at the World Bank in Washington, DC, and in 1988 she returned to Israel, and for six years she worked at Bank Leumi in Tel Aviv, Israel, and was in charge of developing relationships with foreign banks. At the World Bank she specialized in loans for economic aid programs for developing countries. In Peru, before becoming first lady, she worked for USAID.
Karp speaks seven languages: French, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Dutch, Portuguese, and Quechua, a native Peruvian language. Before her husband was elected president, she gave several campaign speeches in Quechua, which helped her husband's election campaign. At one rally in the Andean city of Huaraz, Karp declared that the "apus" (mountain gods of Peru's ancient Indian cultures) had spoken and that Toledo's election would break a "curse of 500 years" of oppression. Karp likes to dress in bold-colored suits with earrings and oversized necklaces bearing pre-Columbian motifs.
Karp serves on the board of several organizations. She is the Honorary President and Founder of the Fund for Development of Indigenous Communities of Latin America and the Caribbean, and she was once the Honorary President of the National Commission on Andean, Amazon and Afro-Peruvian Communities (CONAPA) of Peru.
She published an extensive list of books, papers and articles.
[edit] First Lady
Karp accompanied Toledo into office with ambitious plans to address social inequality and the needs of Peru's poor. When she became Peru's first lady, she promised to shake up the capital's elite and avoid the socialite duties customary to presidential wives. Toledo later appointed her honorary head of a commission to address multicultural issues.
[edit] Current Activities
Eliane Karp-Toledo currently lives in Washington, D.C., where she is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology at George Washington University. She teaches classes there on the culture and social organization of indigenous peoples in the Andean countries and their struggle for greater rights and participation in public life and democratic politics.
Previously, she was at Stanford University, where she was a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, as well as a Resident Scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (www.casbs.org)
During the 2008-2009 academic year, Dr. Karp-Toledo conducted an investigation on the successful struggle of native peoples in three Andean countries to influence the destiny of their nations.
Among her immediate goals is to publish a new book in 2009 on lessons and experiences in implementing public policies that foster the inclusion of indigenous peoples in Latin American countries.
She also participates in research on social inclusion and equality in the foundation created by former president Alejandro Toledo, the Global Center for Development and Democracy (www.cgdd.org).
