• Academics
• BRANDEIS HOME

Events and Colloquia

Monday, November 16, 2009

Eighth Annual Saler Lecture in Religious Studies

Robert Weller speaks on "Ritual and the Rhythms of Ambiguity"
12 noon, International Lounge, Usdan Student Center

How do we deal with the ambiguities inherent to all categories? Anthropologists have long argued that we taboo the ambiguous areas or that we allow them to be explored only if they are surrounded by powerful boundaries. There are, however, other solutions that lead to a greater comfort with ambiguity and an ability to negotiate across boundaries—something that is crucial for pluralism and for empathy. 

This talk examines ritual as one such solution. Ritual always crosses boundaries: between deity and humanity, adulthood and childhood, or even just between the ritual itself and non-ritual activity. The talk focuses on the way ritual rhythms and meter create a shared sense of time and possibility as part of a dialectic between order and ambiguity. Examples are drawn primarily from contemporary Chinese ethnography.

Robert Weller is professor and chair of anthropology and
 research associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University. His present research is concerned with the development of the environmental movement and nature tourism in China and Taiwan in the context of economic growth. He is also looking at the role of local voluntary organizations as mediators between state and society in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, and he has consulted on poverty and unemployment relief in western China. 

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Sarah Pinto

3:30 to 5:00 p.m.
Location: TBA

Sarah Pinto is an assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University. Her research interests include South Asia, gender, power and subjectivity, kinship, psychiatry, reproduction and postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory. She has conducted research on childbirth, traditional midwives, and the politics of health intervention in rural north India, as well as on caste issues related to health and medicine.

Pinto is currently researching women and mental illness in urban India, with a focus on kinship, law, symptom presentation, and forms of care — the worlds that coalesce and dissolve around women as “patients” and around the gendered subject in distress.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

First Annual Hunt Lecture in Economic Anthropology: Jane I. Guyer 

3:30 to 5:00 pm

Location: TBA

Jane I. Guyer is a Professor of Anthropology at John Hopkins University. Her research career has been devoted to economic transformations in West Africa, particularly the productive economy, the division of labor and the management of money. Theoretically she focuses on the interface between formal and informal economies, and particularly the instabilities that interface gives rise to. Her co-edited book is the result of collaborative work with a Nigeria-based networkof social scientists, on currency devaluation in the popular economy under structural adjustment and military rule in the 1990s (Money Struggles and CityLife, 2002). In 2008 Jane Guyer was elected to the National Academy of Sciences(Anthropology Section).

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Matthew J. Liebmann

3:30 to 5:00 pm

Location: TBA  

Matthew J. Liebmann is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in theArchaeology Program at Harvard University. His primary research focuses on thearchaeology of the Southwest U.S., with a specialization in the contact periodand the historic-era Pueblos of New Mexico. He is particularly interested inthe changes to Indigenous life that occurred during the seventeenth century,following the arrival of Europeans into the northern Rio Grande region.

April 22, 2010

3:30 to 5:00 pm

Location: TBA

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Lori Allen

Lori Allen is an anthropologist whose primary research interests center on human rights, nationalism, violence, visual culture, political emotion, and the Middle East. She has investigated the ways in which understandings of pain and suffering and the ethics of violence play out in Palestinian politics, in particular through the activities and discourses of human rights in the occupied territories. 

Dr. Allen is a Lecturer in Contemporary Middle Eastern Politics & Society at the University of Cambridge. 

PAST EVENTS:

Thursday, September 17

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Megan McCullough

Refuting 'I Am Woman': Stratified Reproduction and the Hierarchy of Knowledge in a Doula Workshop

3:30 to 5 p.m.
Location: Lown 2 

This talk explores the stratified power relations concealed within public health perceptions of Australian Aboriginal prenatal health behavior. By focusing on a "doula" (birth attendant) workshop organized by a non-indigenous nurse-midwife for Queensland Aboriginal women McCullough examines how the midwife and the Aboriginal participants attempt, from distinct subject positions, to contest and to reinterpret the state's hierarchies of meaning in obstetric policies.

By analyzing the cultural "gap" of understanding between the perceptions of the participants and the organizer of this workshop, as well as the pressures each must contend with from the larger biomedical complex, McCullough demonstrates the ways power, hierarchy and inequality are structured across cultural and racial boundaries. She explores how such public health social structures inhibit everyday social interaction and hinder basic attempts at communication on the local level, as well as how modest health training workshops can work to reinforce larger processes that make hierarchies of knowledge and social practice appear natural and inevitable.

Megan McCullough is a Visiting Research Scholar at Brandeis and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wheaton College. Her research interests focus on cross-cultural understandings of the body; medical anthropology, with an emphasis on anthropological approaches to reproduction; indigenous people and health disparities; urban indigenous people; gender, kinship and social networks; exchange, and personhood. 

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Alex Weingrod

"Bones, Burials and Forming the Nation"

5:10 to 6:30 p.m.
Location: Usdan International Lounge

Alex Weingrod is a Visiting Scholar at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. He is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology-Anthropology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel. Weingrod was a member of the Brandeis University faculty from 1963 to 1975, and has taught at universities in the United States, England and Israel. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford; a Member of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton; Visiting Fellow, Centre for Middle East Studies, Harvard University; and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Collegium, Budapest.

Weingrod's most recent book (with Andre Levy) is "Homelands and Diasporas: Holy Lands and Other Places" (2005). His previous publications include "The Saint of Beersheba" (1990), and (with M. Romann) "Living Together Separately: Arabs and Jews in Contemporary Jerusalem" (1991). He is presently working on an anthropological study of contemporary Israeli society.

This is the first lecture in a three-lecture series. 

Co-sponsored by the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. A reception will follow the lecture.

Monday, October 19

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Alex Weingrod

"Ethnicity Matters; Or Does It?"

5:10 to 6:30 p.m.
Rapaporte Treasure Hall

Co-sponsored by the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. A reception will follow the lecture.

Thursday, October 22

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Alex Weingrod

"The New Israeli Minorities"

3:30 pm to 6:00 p.m.

Rapaporte Treasure Hall

Co-sponsored by the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. A reception will follow the lecture. 

Friday, October 23, 2009

Ancient Worlds of the Americas: Explorations in Anthropological Archaeology at Brandeis University

1:30 to 6:00 p.m.
Napoli Trophy Room, Gosman Convocation Center

This conference will showcase the work of anthropology graduate students. For a detailed schedule, including speakers and abstracts, click here: Ancient Worlds of the Americas. 

The event is part of the Massachusetts Archeology Month. 

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Yoram Bilu

2:00 to 3:30 pm

Location: TBA

Yoram Bilu holds a joint appointment at theHebrew University of Jerusalem in the Department of Psychology, where he is theSylvia Bauman Professor, and in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Aclinical psychologist turned anthropologist, he is interested in the interfaceof culture and psychology as reflected in mental health, folk-religion, andaltered states of consciousness. He received the Bahat Prize for his book, TheSaint Impresarios: Dreamers, Healers, and Holy Men in Israel’s Urban Periphery,Haifa University Press (2005). At Brandeis this fall, he is a visiting scholarwith the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, and is teaching two courses inthe Department of Anthropology.

Co-sponsored by the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies.