Events in the Department of Anthropology

Other Years

Archaeology Brown-Bag Workshops Convenes more-or-less biweekly, on Tuesdays at 12:00 noon, in Room 103A, on the first floor of Brooks Hall. The Workshop will resume next semester

Linguistic Anthropology Seminar Seminars are held about once a month, usually on Friday afternoons from 1-3pm. Click here for the schedule.

 

The Department of Anthropology's Speaker Series and Related Events

A DOC Poster for the events is HERE!

Talks are normally held at 1pm in the Brooks Hall Conference Room, unless otherwise noted.

Spring 2011

• 28 January — JOE MASCO — The Apocalyptic Sensibility.
  
  Joe Masco is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, he writes and teaches courses on science and technology, U.S. national security culture, political ecology, mass media, and critical theory. His first book, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2006), theorized the nuclear age by exploring how the end of the Cold War challenged concepts of security and risk for the diverse communities working in and neighboring Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. His current work examines the evolution of the national security state in the United States, with a particular focus on the interplay between affect, technology, and threat perception within a national public sphere.
  
  
• 25 February — CLAIRE BOWERN, PATIENCE EPPS, & PATRICK McCONVELL — Hunter-Gatherers and Language Change.
  
  Bowern, Epps, and McConvell are members of a research team that is considering the dynamics of language change, contact, and spread among hunter-gatherer groups, together with Jane Hill, Keith Hunley, Russell Gray, and John (Jack) Ives. Bowern is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Yale University. Her work focuses on descriptive/ documentary and historical linguistics of Australian languages, including the reconstruction of the Pama-Nyungan language family; her publications include Linguistic fieldwork: A practical guide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Epps is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and her research interests include description/documentation, discourse and verbal art, and language contact and change in Amazonia. Her publications include A grammar of Hup (Mouton de Gruyter, 2008). McConvell is a Research Fellow in Linguistics at Australian National University. His work deals with languages of Australia, ranging from grammatical description to studies of code-switching and creole formation, kinship, and other aspects of the relationship between language, society, and culture; publications include the articles 'Language shift, code-mixing and variation' and 'Millers and mullers: The archaeolinguistic stratigraphy of seed-grinding in Central Australia'.
  
  
• 18 March — A. LYNN BOLLES — Criminal Silences.
  
  Professor Lynn Bolles is a Professor in Women's Studies at the Univeristy of Maryland. She is also an affiliate faculty with Anthropology, African American Studies, American Studies and Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on the importance of economic analysis and on the impact of class on women in the English-speaking Caribbean. At present, Bolles is finishing her project on race, class and women tourist workers in Negril, Jamaica, and a textbook on Pan-Caribbean women's experiences. An active member of numerous professional organizations, Dr. Bolles has served as the President of the Association of Black Anthropologists (1983-84); the Caribbean Studies Association (1997-98), the largest and oldest scholarly organization focusing on the region; and the Association for Feminist Anthropology (2001-03). Dr. Bolles is also the president-elect of the Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA) (2009-2011).
  
  
• 25 March — Cosponsored by the East Asia Center and the Linguistic Anthropology Seminar:
  
  QING ZHANG — The enregisterment of a new Mandarin style: An integrated
  approach to linguistic innovation.
  
  Qing Zhang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her work deals with the entanglements of linguistic practice and rapid socioeconomic transformations in the People's Republic of China. Her approach "treats language not merely as reflecting or responding to societal changes but as being among the very forces and resources that reconfigure the contemporary social-political landscape of China." She is the author of multiple essays, including "Rhotacization and the 'Beijing Smooth Operator': the social meaning of a linguistic variable" (2008), "Cosmopolitanism and linguistic capital in China" (2007), and "The linguistic construction of the Tongzhi Community" (2001).
  
  
  
• 1 April — STEPHAN PALMIÉ — The Original African Repo Man: A note on the Equiano Wars.
  
  Stephan Palmié is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, he conducts ethnographic and historical research on Afro-Caribbean cultures, with an emphasis on Afro-Cuban religious formations and their relations to the history and cultures of a wider Atlantic world. His other interests include practices of historical representation and knowledge production, systems of slavery and unfree labor, constructions of race and ethnicity, conceptions of embodiment and moral personhood, medical anthropology, and the anthropology of food and cuisine.
  
  
• 08 April — CHRISTINE HARSTOF — Boiled and roasted: identity through food preparation and the social life of Formative Titicaca Basin, Bolivia.
  
  Christine Harstof is Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the UCB McCown Archaeobotany Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on social life, political change, agricultural production, foodways, and the methodologies that lead to a better understanding of the past through the study of plant-use. She has written on agricultural production, cooking practices and what shifts in these suggest about social relations, gender relations surrounding plant use, the rise of complex society, political change and the symbolic use of plants in the legitimation of authority, fuel use and related symbolism, and plant domestication as part of social identity construction and ritual and social identity. She is particularly interested in wild plant use as compared to domesticates, identifying the stages in plant processing, their participation in social construction, and especially their participation and reflection of the symbolic and the political, in addition to the playing out of the concept of culture in the natural world.
  
  
• April 22 — CARLA FREEMAN — Creole Respectability in a Neoliberal Age.
  
  Carla Freeman is Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies, and serves as a Core Faculty member in the MARIAL Center (Myth and Ritual in American Family Life), and associated faculty in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Emory. Freeman earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Temple University in 1993. Her publications include a book, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink Collar Identities in the Caribbean, (Duke University Press, 2000), and articles on gender, globalization, labor, and identity in the Caribbean, in such journals as American Ethnologist, Signs: Journal of Women, Culture and Society, Feminist Studies, Critique of Anthropology, and Cultural Anthropology. She is currently completing a book about entrepreneurship and the making of the Caribbean Middle Class.
  

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Spring Socio-Cultural Workshop Schedule

Unless otherwise noted, all meetings will be on Thursday evenings from 7:30-9:30 pm in the Brooks Hall Conference Room (2nd Floor). Snacks provided.

Date	Participant	Title	Role
January 20	Sherrilynn Colby-Bottel	"Guardians of the Groove, WWOZ 90.7 FM Community Radio"	Grad Student
February 3	Jason Hickel	"'Democracy is Death': Homesteads, Hierarchy, and Vigilante Violence in South Africa" (Practice Job Talk)	Grad Student
February 17 (Wed)	Amy Nichols-Belo	Chapter TBA from "Producing Uchawi: Embodied Experience and Anti-witchcraft Practice in Mwanza, Tanzania"	Grad Student
March 2 (Wed)	Andy Nelson	"Between the Mandala and Brick: Towards the Lived Space of Houses in New Kathmandu"	Grad Student	March 24	Todne T. Chipumuro	"Becoming 'Real' Brothers and Sisters: Ethnographizing Evangelical Spiritual Kinship"	Grad Student	March 31	Stephan Palmie	"Historical Knowledge and its Conditions of Impossibility"	Visiting Presenter	April 14	Sergio Lopez	"Sense of Humor, Sense of Power"	Visiting Presenter
April 28	Niklas Hultin	"Rote Fantasies: Law, Globalization, and the Procedural Imagination in Africa's Human Right Capital"	Visiting Presenter

Please contact Amy Nichols-Belo (abn5v@virginia.edu) if you would like to be added to the SCW google calendar

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Fall 2010

• 03 September — MARCIN KILARSKI — Eskimo Words for Snow And Linguistic Misconceptions in Social Sciences and Philosophy.
  
  Marcin Kilarski is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. He has a Ph.D. in English Linguistics from Adam Mickiewicz University and has published on such topics as grammatical gender in Scandinavian languages, the effects of language contact, Cherokee classificatory verbs, and the history of linguistics. His research interests are morphology, language typology, language contact, and linguistic borrowing.
  
  
  
• 24 September — RENA LEDERMAN — Comparative "Methods": An Anthropology of Disciplinarity.
  
  Rena Lederman is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. She has conducted fieldwork in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the political economy of gift exchange, on inequality and leadership, on gender roles and ideologies, and on historical consciousness and change. She is currently completing a book on disciplinarity in and around anthropology entitled Anthropology Among the Disciplines. Her other ongoing research concerns research ethics across the disciplines; and the challenge of translating science and other expert knowledges in popular media.
  

 

• 8 October — EAST ASIA CENTER LECTURE:
  
  LAURA NELSON — Personal / Political Consciousness: South Korean Women Confront Breast Cancer.
  
  Laura Nelson is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Anthropology at California State University-East Bay. She has published a book, Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea (Columbia University Press 2000), on economic and social change in South Korea, and continues to examine South Korean consumer life, in particular the multiple effects of the expansion of consumer credit. Her current research interests include the effects of changing demographics on South Korean society, as well as a study of women microentrepreneurs in the San Francisco Bay area. After she herself went through breast cancer treatment in 2008, she undertook research into South Korean women's experiences with breast cancer.
  
  
  
• 22 October, 11am. — EAST ASIA CENTER LECTURE: (lunch provided)
  
  PAN YULING — TBA.
  
  Yuling Pan is a socio-linguist at the U.S. Census Bureau. She is the author of several book length studies including Politeness in Chinese Face-to-Face Interaction (2000, Ablex), co-author with Suzanne Wong Scollon and Ron Scollon of Professional Communication in International Settings (2002, Blackwell), and co-author with Daniel Z. Kadar of Historical and Contemporary Chinese Politeness (forthcoming Continuum). She has also written essays related to her work at the Census Bureau, including "Cross-cultural Communication Norms and Survey Interviews," (In It's the Dragon's Turn: Chinese Institutional Discourses, edited by Hao Sun and Daniel Z. Kadar, 2008, Peter Lang) and "Conveying Translated Informed Consent Concepts," (2009, Census Bureau).
  
  
  
• 29 October — MATTHEW ENGELKE — Angels in Swindon: On the Production of Ambient Faith.
  
  Matthew Engelke received his PhD at the University of Virginia, and is currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. He has conducted research on apostolic Christianity in Zimbabwe and, more recently, public religion and evangelicals in England. His monograph, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (U Cal Press 2007) won the 2008 Clifford Geertz Prize and the 2009 Victor Turner Prize. He has recently been appointed editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and, from January 2011, will begin a new fieldwork project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, on the British Humanist Association and the anthropology of atheism.
  
  
  
• 5 November — JOEL ROBBINS — Imagination, the Future, and the Ideal.
  
  Joel Robbins received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of California- San Diego. Trained in symbolic, semiotic and structural anthropology, Robbins has carried out research focused on Christianity and cultural change among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea. Building on this background, for the last several years Robbins has been conducting research on the social and cultural processes that have shaped the rapid globalization of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity.
  
  
  
• 12 November — J. DAVID SAPIR — The Nagra Tapes, samples of Kujamaat poetics (Anthropology traveling Second Class).
  
  J. David Sapir is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. His field studies took him to the Casamance, Sénégal where he worked with the Language, Symbolism and Folklore of the Kujamaat Jóola. The website: http://www.people.virginia.edu/~ds8s/Kujamaat-Joola/ will give you an idea of what he is up to.
  
  
• 3 December — CHACO DIGITAL INITIATIVE:
  
  R. GWINN VIVIAN — Interpreting Chaco: Levels of Knowledge and Sense of Place
  
  Gwinn Vivian is Curator Emeritus at the Arizona State Museum. His archaeological fieldwork has examined the Native American history and prehistory-both Pueblo and Navajo-of Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a World Heritage Site in northwestern New Mexico. Vivian's research has focused on prehistoric agriculture, particularly the construction and management of water control systems such as reservoirs and canals that delivered water to gridded fields, and the implications of these systems for social and political organization. He is currently working on a book that will summarize his decades of research on the water control systems.
  
  

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