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

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

 

Spring 2012

• 27 January — Erica Caple James (Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, MIT) Pastoral Power, Haitian Migration, and the Biopolitics of Catholic Charity in the United States.
  
  
• Thursday, 9 February 5:30PM — Simon Holdaway (Professor, University of Auckland, New Zealand) A Truly Unique Record? The Curation and Abandonment of Australian Aboriginal Stone Artifacts.
  
  
• 10 February — Madelyn Wessel (Associate General Counsel, University of Virginia) Intellectual Property in Anthropology.
  
  
• 24 February — Farzaneh Milani (Professor & Chair, Department Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Virginia) Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement.
  
  
• 16 March— Deborah Winslow (Director, Cultural Anthropology, National Science Foundation) Dravidian Kinship and Small-World Networks.
  
  
• 23 March — Mark West (Professor & Dean for Academic Affairs, University of Michigan Law School) Love Stick Japan. Sponsored by the East Asia Center and Department of Anthropology.
  
  
• 6 April — Michael Herzfeld (Professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University) RITUALISM AS AGENCY AND CULTURAL CAPITAL: The Role of Meetings in Political Protest in Rome and Bangkok.
  
  
• 27 April — Michael Adas (Abraham E. Voorhees Professor of History & Board of Governors' Chair, Department of History, Rutgers University.) "Subaltern Intellectuals": A Useful (but Neglected) Category of Anthrohistorical Analysis.
  

Fall 2011

 

• 2 September — Jeffrey Hantman (Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia) Sites in History, History in Sites:Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Knowledge in the Chesapeake (A.D. 1200 - 2010).
  
  
• 14 October — Christine Hastorf (Professor, Department of Anthropology University of California, Berkeley) BOILED AND ROASTED Identity Through Food Preparation And The Social Life Of Formative Titicaca Basin, Bolivia.
  

  How do daily meals resemble larger feast gatherings? In many cultures every act associated with food is filled with meaning and sanctity, for these are gifts from the spirits, the powers of the earth.Plowing the fields, harvesting the crops, and processing the ingredients, all that sustains the living are gifts of the earth, given in exchange for honoring the deities.Feasts usually feed more people than daily household meals, and by their scale, gain centrifugal meanings.The ritual foods for the deities, ancestors and large groups do not often look like daily meals, typically being drier than the daily meal, being steamed or roasted as opposed meals based around soups or gruels.While these different meals can be identified in their own right archaeologically, due to the differences in serving dishes and preparation, it is often by their context that we identify them as ritual events.One of the goals of the Taraco Archaeological Project (TAP) is to study the past foodways in the Lake Titicaca Basin, Bolivia.As we study the plant and animal remains hermeneutically, their treatment informs us about meal preparation and presentation.Interestingly, their ceremonial locations have evidence of unusual ingredients, suggesting that experimentation with exotic foods occurred in ritual settings on a community level, reflecting centripetal constructions in these larger meals.

• 21 October — Gabriella Lukacs (Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh) Dreamwork: Cell Phone Novelists, Labor, and Politics in Contemporary Japan. (cosponored by the East Asia Center}
  

  In 2007, the number of cell phone novels posted on the popular portal, maho no i-rando, reached one million—a figure that has puzzled observers worldwide. Critics claim that young women write these novels in transit and in transition; these women merely translate their feelings of boredom and lack of spirit into an escapist pastime. By contrast, I analyze the cell phone novel phenomenon as a site that reveals how young people respond to their incorporation into a precarious labor regime and to their exclusion from collectivities (e.g., workplace and family) that offered their parents key resources for self-determination. More specifically, I make three arguments in my presentation. First, I posit that the cell phone novel phenomenon sheds light on transformations in the meanings and forms of work. I argue that affective labor—as performed by cell phone novelists—has become a valorized form of labor because it couples in a virtuous liaison the intensifying demand for workers to invest their humanity in the work process and the growing desire of workers for self-fulfilling work. Second, I suggest that the cell phone novel phenomenon discloses how digital media technologies enable young people to experiment with new modes of political engagement. I argue that by drawing on the dynamics of capillary communication, the writers and readers of cell phone novels produced a conjuncture at which they were able to develop critical insights about work, solidarity, and future. Lastly, I propose a new approach to understanding the shifting place of youth on the Japanese labor market. Critics blame young Japanese people for having a diminished sense of commitment to work. Others interpret the historical heights in youth unemployment as an effect of a volatile economy’s ever growing demand for flexible labor. I aim to point a way beyond the stalemate of these polarized analyses by examining the production of cell phone novels as a practice that reveals how young people actively seek ways to move forward.



• Monday, 24 October — Nisha Ligon (Documentary Filmmaker) will screen her film: Twiga Stars: Tanzania's Soccer Sisters.
  Time & Place: 6:30 PM. Minor Hall 125. Sponsored by the Anthropology Department and Carter-Woodson Institute.
  
  


• 4 Novemberr — H. Hank Shugart (Professor, Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia) FROM THE BOOK OF JOB, Feeding the Lions andThe Conservation of Biological Diversityon a Changing Planet.
  

  The “Whirlwind Speech” from the Book of Job, a set of divine questions on the functioning of the planet and its natural systems, provides a starting point to discuss current global environmental issues. The first question from God to Job is, “Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding.’”[1] Having set a combative tone, God proceeds to interrogate Job as to what he knows of the planet’s creation, its environment, and its animals. Job says that he cannot answer any of these divine questions. One of these divine questions is, “Can you hunt the prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert?[2] This seminar will discuss this astutely challenging question, which goes to the issue of whether humans have the knowledge to conserve planetary biological diversity. The issues discussed include what biological features make an assemblage of animals vulnerable to advertent or inadvertent human actions. Past ecosystem interactions with human cultures in North America, Australia, and the tropical islands of the Pacific reveal the potential for people to radically alter the floras and faunas of novel places. However, the interpretation of these cases is made complex by other factors such as climate change, introduced animals and land-use change. The ultimate question is whether humans can wisely manage the planet as our population reached 7 billion last week, or will reach 8 billion in 18 years, or … The Whirlwind Questions from Book of Job have a “man-in-nature” motif that is in sharp contrast with the “man-in-charge-of-nature” theme in the other creation accounts of the Bible. Certainly, past human history is not prologue for future enlightened environmental management. The past speaks to how difficult it has been for humans to shepherd the planet in past times. Can we care for the “lions.”

• 11 November 3:30-5:00 — Anthony Pickles (PhD Candidate, Centre for Pacific Studies, University of St Andrews) How to Win at Cards: Hints and Tips from the New Guinea Highlands.
  

  In the Highland town of Goroka, gambling capital of Papua New Guinea, knowing how to play is second nature. There is no shortage of card games, yet two dominate the landscape, the most longstanding of which (kwin) I discuss in this paper. Gambling as a practice is of colonial origin, but the games are indigenous forms; I attempt to unravel one game’s intricacies and through it how Gorokan ideas play out every day on the street corner. I do this the only way of really knowing a game: exploring the attributes and attitudes required for victory. Doing so leads the anthropologist into a web of cause and effect, pivots and patterns, speaking to some of the core themes associated with what has become known as the New Melanesian Ethnography. The material affords an opportunity to explore the form of Gorokan ideas about abstraction and self-direction, and substantiates a critique directed against scholars with a propensity to replicate an unchanging Melanesian personhood in their models. This is because some theories of causality in Melanesian anthropology only allow for one possible model, and thus imply that Melanesians are incapable of reifying their own model and acting upon it. It is argued that while Melanesianist models seem to get cumulatively more abstract, Melanesians themselves are often denied their own propensity to see the big picture, a situation I find ethnographically untenable. I tentatively propose that Gorokan abstraction adds another dimension to causality that allows us to more easily grasp Melanesian social change.



• 2 December — Candace Green (Ethnologist, Collections and Archives Program, Director, Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution) Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology: Research Training at the Smithsonian.
  

  Museum collections are being rediscovered as a potential source of anthropological data, relevant to topics as diverse as exchange theory, visual anthropology, and indigenous history. The Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA) was created to build methodological bridges between theory and things, a gap that many university programs cannot address. Supported by the Cultural Anthropology Program of the National Science Foundation, SIMA uses the Smithsonian’s anthropology collections as a central resource for an intensive four-week training program in research methods for graduate students.
  
  Dr. Candace Greene directs the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology. She is an ethnologist with the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Her research focuses on Native North American art and material culture, especially Plains Indian drawings.

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