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Anthropology Lecture Series

Events and Colloquia

Wednesday, February 8

Anthropology Colloquium: Noah Tamarkin (Brandeis University)

12 noon; Mandel Reading Room (Room 303)

"Genetic Diaspora: Dis/Connections Across Time and Space"

Lemba people in South Africa are internationally known for their participation in DNA tests that aimed to genetically test their Jewish ancestry.  Their test results labeled the Lemba a “lost tribe of Israel” and prompted visits from Jews, mostly American, hoping to connect with the Lemba on the basis of a presumed shared membership in the Jewish Diaspora.  In this paper, I examine encounters between Lemba people and visiting Jews as an entry point into the question: how do Lemba people and their Jewish interlocutors navigate their different understandings of the biological and cultural connections that they hope to have with one another?  How do their different understandings reshape discourses and experiences of race, religion, and identity?  I suggest that this “genetic diaspora” is a form of connection across time and space that ironically results in disconnections and the destabilization of the very ideas of diaspora that bring it into being.

Thursday, February 9

Anthropology Colloquium:

Reproduction for/against the State: Family Planning, Structural Violence, and Class in Chinese Women’s Reproductive Experiences

Junjie Chen, Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

12 noon; International Lounge, Usdan

Drawing on 16 months of fieldwork in and around an inter-ethnic Manchu-Han community in northeast China, this talk examines structural violence as a force that has conditioned and shaped rural Chinese women’s reproductive experiences over the past three decades. Documenting and situating village women’s reproductive stories in the broader context of China’s post-socialist transformation, this talk illustrates how the Chinese state’s recent “humane” birth control policy has become a hollow promise to ordinary villagers trapped by enlarging class-based social divides in post-socialist rural China.

Junjie Chen received his PhD in December 2011 from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is currently a Freeman Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Science and Technology at the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, and a research associate in the Anthropology Department, both at UIUC. From earlier training in sociology and population studies at Peking University in China, he also possesses a doctorate in sociology (1996). His dissertation, While the State Claims the Intimate: Population Control Policy and the Makings of Chinese Modernity, offers an ethnographic account of China's globalizing efforts as reconfigured in the seemingly intimate space of reproduction. The University of Chicago Press has recently issued an advance contract to publish a book based on his doctoral dissertation.

Tuesday, February 14

Anthropology Colloquium:  Amy June Sousa

The Ethics of Hope: Diagnostic Practice and the Social Experience of Schizophrenia in North India

9:30 a.m.; Shiffman 216

What does it mean to have schizophrenia in the absence of a diagnosis?  This paper attempts an answer by critically examining how diagnostic conventions shape the everyday experience of serious mental illness.  In North India, diagnoses are peripheral to clinical practice.  While psychiatrists may assign diagnoses to those they treat, they rarely share this information with patients and their families.  In fact, they often deemphasize biomedical particularities and underplay the severity of grave conditions.  Rather than critique these practices as careless or paternalistic, this paper explores the underlying moral logic of a non-diagnostically centered approach to mental health care and the ways it may contribute to better prognoses.  I approach this through the story of two sisters who both suffer from schizophrenia, but in very different ways.  Their stories illustrate the power of clinical encounters to shape broader social attitudes and individual expectations for the future.  I then use the experiences of these women as a lens through which we can begin to reconsider some of our own medical protocols in the US and the ethical conundrums they pose.

Amy Sousa received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.  Trained as a medical anthropologist, Amy’s research interests include psychiatry, the anthropology of ethics and morality, social epidemiology, global pharmaceuticals and South Asia.  She has conducted extensive research in psychiatric hospitals, clinics, private homes and pharmaceutical marketing headquarters in North India and the US.  Amy received her MA from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and her BA in Anthropology from New York University.  Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships including Fulbright-Hays DDRA and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation.

Thursday, February 16

Anthropology Colloquium:  Anita Hannig

Spiritual Border Crossings: Postpartum Seclusion and Religious Otherness in Ethiopia

12 noon; International Lounge, Usdan

The event of childbirth, the world over, is imbued with special ritual significance that speaks to the threats inherent in human reproduction. The giving of new life, forever wedded to its antithesis – the possibility of death – has classically been interpreted as a crossing of boundaries or a transition between two states. As any such transition it represents a danger, since social categories are momentarily confused. However, the categorical messiness associated with the processes of giving life is not resolved with the event of childbirth as such. Postpartum, mother and child often remain bound in a state of ambiguity that requires careful management, most commonly through the temporary seclusion of the mother-child pair from the rest of society.

This lecture examines one such case of postpartum seclusion in the predominantly Orthodox Christian region of northwestern Ethiopia. It interrogates a puzzling feature of this episode of isolation: during the time between the birth of a child and its baptism, which is spent in private confinement, both mother and child are viewed as Muslims. Why should this be the case? Drawing on detailed ethnographic data from fieldwork at a rural hospital in Ethiopia, this lecture offers ways of answering this puzzle by pointing to the particular material tenets that underlie Ethiopian Christian Orthodoxy as a religious form. In the course of this inquiry, one comes to view Orthodox identity as continuously produced in concrete, sacred acts, rather than as given.

Anita Hannig is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation is an institutional ethnography of a foreign-run hospital in northwest Ethiopia, dedicated to curing women suffering from a childbirth injury called obstetric fistula. Hannig is the recipient of a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship.

Wednesday, March 28th

Anthropology Colloquium Series: David M. Carballo

12:00 pm; International Lounge, Usdan

"Ritual Offerings and Sacred Architecture in Ancient Central Mexico"

The talk will examine the socially integrative and divisive elements of ritual offerings and ceremonial space within later Formative period (c. 600 BC – AD 100) central Mexico, with a particular focus on recent investigations at La Laguna, Tlaxcala. These investigations seek to elucidate community dynamics and corporate organization within the archaeological record of the region, and to examine the particular historical legacies of Formative ritual to later societies, such as the Aztecs, Toltecs, and Teotihuacanos. They also speak to the dramatic reconfiguration of central Mexico during its initial period of urbanization and state formation.

David M. Carballo is Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Boston University. He is a specialist in Mesoamerican archaeology, focusing particularly on the prehispanic civilizations of central Mexico. His recent work includes exploration of the political and symbolic dimensions of state power through excavations and analyses of obsidian workshop deposits next to the Moon Pyramid, at the early metropolis of Teotihuacan. Since 2005 he has directed the Proyecto Arqueológico La Laguna, in northern Tlaxcala, with support from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, and other institutions. Ongoing investigations focus on the domestic life of households, community ritual, and the effects of Teotihuacano political expansion through the region.

Past Events

Thursday, February 2

Anthropology Colloquium:

From AIDS to Aid: Botswana’s Orphan ‘Crisis’ and the Aftermath of an Epidemic

Bianca Dahl, Cogut Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology, Population Studies, and the International Humanities, Brown University

12 noon; Mandel Reading Room (Room 303)

With one out of every four adults infected with HIV, it is no surprise that talk of ‘crisis’ frames much of the discussion around Botswana’s epidemic. As Tswana politicians and villagers alike lament what they call the failings of their culture in the face of dramatic demographic changes, scholarship tends to replicate the disaster rhetoric without examining the terms of its production. How might medical anthropology probe beyond an uncritical notion of crisis to understand the material, affective, and experiential effects of AIDS – and the aid industry it has generated – on everyday forms of sociality and subjectivity?

Pushing past the emphasis on treatment modalities and illness conceptions that dominates much of the anthropology of AIDS, I foreground arguably the most symbolically significant group in Botswana today – orphaned children – as a pivotal population around whom new forms of relationality and personhood are being forged. This talk explores the interpenetrating material and emotional economies circulating through aid interventions for orphans. By demonstrating how foreign-funded orphan-care charities create new relations of inequality, alter kinship practices, and reach deep into the emotional lives of orphans, I seek to disentangle the components of the HIV ‘crisis,’ its meanings, and its consequences at multiple social levels.

Bianca Dahl is currently a postdoctoral fellow in anthropology, population studies, and the international humanities at Brown University, having received her PhD from the University of Chicago. Dahl’s research focuses on the social consequences of humanitarian intervention in response to Botswana’s AIDS epidemic, particularly focusing on orphans and HIV-positive children. Dahl’s book manuscript project received the 2012 Social Science Research Council Book Fellowship Award.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Anthropology Lecture: Ieva Jusionyte

3:00 pm; Mandel Reading Room (Room 303)

"On and Off the Record: The Production of the Legal and the Illegal in an Argentine Border Town"

Friday, November 11th. 2011

11th Annual Saler Lecture in Religious Studies: Mark Auslander (Central Washington University)

4:00 pm; Mandel Atrium

"In Slavery’s Shadows: Paradoxes of Religion, Race and Art"

Master-slave relations figure prominently in diverse religious and ritual systems, as well as the artistic representations they have inspired. The structural relationship of  Lord to bondsman, as well as shepherd to flock, informs monotheistic and polytheistic traditions the world over. Yet paradoxically, this deeply resonant imagery may be deployed, in mythological and artistic forms, to sustain or overturn social conditions of enslavement and oppression.  In this presentation, Mark Auslander considers varied cosmological and aesthetic meditations on slavery and revolution in classical and contemporary works of art.  He then turns to a specific historical and ethnographic case, the long contested narrative of a specific enslaved woman, know as “Miss Kitty,” whose ownership by a prominent Methodist Bishop led to the national schism of the Methodist Church, and helped launch the nation on the road towards Civil War.  Building on his new book, “The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family,” (University of Georgia Press, 2011)  Dr. Auslander explores the ambiguous affordances of master-slave aesthetic and spiritual imagery in pro-slavery and anti-slavery initiatives across 160 years. He gives particular attention to a complex quilt through which the great great great grand-daughters of Miss Kitty were “welcomed home” to Oxford, Georgia in early 2011 by African American woman in the community. 

To learn more about The Accidental Slaveowner, please see: http://theaccidentalslaveowner.com/

Mark Auslander, a former Brandeis faculty member, is Associate Professor of Anthropology & Museum Studies, and Director of the Museum of Culture and Environment at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, WA. 

Thursday, October 27th

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Robert C. Hunt

12:00-2:00 pm; Rapaporte Treasure Hall

"An Economic Situation in Southern Arizona, 1840-1940: Variable Validity in Ethnographic Analogy"

Hohokam dominated Southern Arizona from 400 to about 1400 CE. Notable for their large irrigation systems, the Hohokam were an unusually large middle range society. My project is to reconstruct the agricultural economy of Hohokam. There is a plenitude of archaeological evidence now available. However, there are no archaeological signatures for some prehistoric behaviors, and they are therefore not directly observable in the archaeological record. Instead we must rely on data on living peoples. Native Americans (including the Pima, or Akimel O’Odham) have lived in the same territory as the Hohokam in recent centuries, growing the same crops with the same technologies. Information from the Pima has been used to reconstruct some Hohokam activities and conditions. This talk focuses on changes in the economic situation in Southern Arizona from 1840 to 1940. The talk examines Spanish, Mexican and US economic and social structures as they developed over the century after 1840, and locates the Pima in that context. Four aspects of modern Pima behavior and context are described: river flow regimes, food production calendar, maize productivity, and Native American Diet, and are placed in the context of the changing economy of Southern Arizona. The validity of retrodicting each of these descriptions to Hohokam in prehistory  is evaluated.

Robert C. Hunt is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University, where he taught as a member of the faculty from 1969 to 2002. He was President of the Society for Economic Anthropology, and most of his career was devoted to the study of the social organization of irrigation, and to economic anthropology. Since retirement he has been primarily working on understanding the Hohokam, a prehistoric culture in Southern Arizona that existed from 400 to 1400 CE.

Friday, October 21st

Anthropology Guest Lecture: James VanderVeen, Indiana University (South Bend)

4:00-5:00 pm; Brown 316

"Double Vision: Opposition and Inversion in Taino Representational Art"

The theme of duality is prevalent in the art of the peoples who met Columbus. The Taino, the indigenous population of the Dominican Republic, made pottery that symbolized several ideas at one time, depending on the viewer's perspective. They combined representations of life and death, earth and sea, and male and female in one ceramic vessel or stone figure. Yet it is the interplay between the oppositions that seemed to be important to them. What happens when life and death meet? What is the result of combining males and females?

Friday, October 7th

Annual Massachusetts Archaeology Month Conference 

1:00-5:00 pm; Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library

“First steps: Preliminary Reports and New Projects of Graduate Students within the Greater New England Area”

The conference will showcase the work of graduate students from Brandeis, Harvard, New York University at Albany, University of Southern Maine, and University of Montreal.

Conference program can be found here. 

2010-2011 Colloquia Series

Tuesday, September 28th

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Charles Golden

"Imaging and Imagining Landscapes of Power in the Western Maya Lowlands"

Abstract: The kingdoms of the Middle and Lower Usumacinta River basin are renowned for the innovative artistry of their sculptors, painters, and masons, as well as their robust historical records.  Outside the stolid “heartland” of Classic period Maya civilization, with its relatively gentle terrain and deep political history, royal courts of the Usumacinta basin were challenged by a fractured natural landscape perched between southern highlands and northern lowlands, and between western and eastern Maya groups.  These dynasties sought creative solutions to their political and geographic conundrums, which are reflected in the vibrant historical representation and monumental imagery of the region. This talk examines the rise and fall of these kingdoms, and through data drawn from remote imaging platforms, the epigraphic record, and archaeological ground survey delves into the importance of the Usumacinta River valley itself in shaping all aspects of political life.

Thursday, October 14th

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Ricardo Godoy, Professor of International Development, Heller School for Social Policy and Management

"Seven Heresies in Anthropology: Findings from a multidisciplinary longitudinal study of native Amazonians in Bolivia"

"As academics, we are socialized into orthodoxies of our discipline and society. The orthodoxies survive the test of time until they are challenged through new evidence." Professor Godoy is a cultural anthropologist with interests in social capital, inequality, econometrics and research design. He collaborates with biological and cultural anthropologists from Northwestern University, the University of Georgia, and others in a longitudinal research study in Boliva.

Friday, October 29th

Archaeo-Nouveau: Celebrating New Scholars in the New England Archaeological Community

Massachusetts Archaeology Month at Brandeis University

Welcome Reception at 11:30 pm, Program begins at Noon.  Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library

Thursday, November 11th

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Richard Werbner '59

Holy Hustlers: Film Screening followed by Q & A with the Director

Richard Werbner is Professor Emeritus in African Anthropology, Honorary Research Professor in Visual Anthropology, and Director of the International Centre for Contemporary Cultural Research at the University of Manchester. Following his graduation from Brandeis in 1959, he traveled to Manchester University (UK) as a Fulbright Scholar, and has held continuous appointments at Manchester since 1961. His current book, in press with the University of California Press, is entitled, Holy Hustlers, Schism and Prophecy.  His other books include Regional Cults (ed., 1977), Land Reform in the Making: Tradition, Public Policy and Ideology in Botswana (ed., 1981), Ritual Passage, Sacred Journey (1989), Postcolonial Identities in Africa (ed., 1996), Memory and Postcolony (ed., 1998), Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa, (ed., 2002), and Tears of the Dead: The Social Biography of an African Family (1991), for which he won the Amaury Talbot Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute. His current project is a study of seances, charismatics, and faith-healing in Botswana's time of AIDS. This project has produced a series of four films, The Well-Being Quest in Botswana, distributed by the Royal Anthropological Institute. Professor Werbner will screen and discuss his film, "Holy Hustlers." 

Reception to follow.

Friday, February 4th

Second Annual Robert C. Hunt Lecture in Economic Anthropology: Gary Feinman (Field Museum)

3:30 pm, Geller Lecture Hall in the Hassenfeld Conference Center

"Reframing the Prehispanic Highland Mesoamerican Economy: A Bottom up Perspective from Oaxaca"

Abstract: Mid-20th century scholars refocused Mesoamerica archaeology toward a more explicit concern with the economy and how it underpinned political relations.  This theoretical turn has proven extremely productive guiding key streams of field research in the region for decades.  In the early absence of a strong empirical foundation, the initial framing of the prehispanic economy naturally drew heavily on extant social theory and Aztec-era documentary sources.  But fieldwork in the Valley of Oaxaca and other regions has yielded new empirical perspectives on these long-standing questions.  In this presentation, the author draws principally on his own Oaxaca field studies to argue that a number of central tenets regarding prehispanic Mesoamerican economies are no longer tenable and require reframing. Gary Feinman is an Adjunct Professor in the departments of anthropology at University of Illinois-Chicago and Northwestern University. He is also a coeditor of the Journal of Archaeological Research.

Gary M. Feinman (PhD, CUNY 1980) <gfeinman@fieldmuseum.org> is the Curator of Mesoamerican and Central American Anthropology at The Field Museum, Chicago, IL. He has directed long-term archaeological field projects in Oaxaca, Mexico and Shandong, China. His research interests include comparative studies of leadership, cooperation, and inequality, preindustrial economics, and the recursive relations between humans and environments over time.

Thursday, February 10th

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Leslie Salzinger (Boston College)

3:30 pm, Pearlman 113

Leslie Salzinger (PhD, UC Berkeley 1998) is an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at Boston College.
Her most recent book is “Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories” (University of California Press, 2003).

In this paper, I argue that global restructuring is enacted around assumptions about, and through struggles over, appropriate masculinity. In the process, masculinity becomes a terrain on which labor is pacified and larger economic policies come to read as simple common sense. I explore these processes within two paradigmatic and contrasting locations - the shop floor of feminized transnational assembly in Mexico's border export-processing plants and the cyber-universe of masculinized, bank-based, currency trading on trading floors in New York and Mexico City. I argue that focusing our attention here, we are able to trace some of the gendered movement of transnational capitalism and to identify its sometimes surprising and often contradictory consequences for the men who inhabit it.

Co-sponsored with Sociology Department and the Latin American and Latino Studies Program.

Wednesday, March 30th

GBAC Distinguished Lecture at Wellesley College: Jean Comaroff will present a lecture entitled, "Theory From the South: How Euro-America is Evolving Towards Africa."  She will address the question "How can northern nation states rethink familiar themes of democracy, national borders, capital, and religion with theory developed in Africa?"

5:00 reception in the Pendleton Atrium, Lecture 6 - 8:30 pm in Pendleton NW 212

Jean Comaroff (PhD, London School of Economics 1974) is Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, and in the Clinical Scholars Program. Comaroff has conduced fieldwork in southern Africa and Great Britain and is interested in colonialism, modernity, ritual, power, and consciousness. Her specific foci of study have included the religion of the Southern Tswana peoples (past and present); colonialism and Christian evangelism and liberation struggles in southern Africa; healing and bodily practice, and the making of local worlds in the wake of global "modernity" and commodification. Her current research concerns problems of public order, state sovereignty and policing in postcolonial contexts, and the challenging relation of legitimacy to force.

Thursday, March 31st

10th Annual Saler Lecture in Religious Studies: Jean Comaroff (University of Chicago)

12 noon, Pearlman Lounge (113)

"Detection, Divination and the Metaphysics of Disorder:  In Pursuit of Sovereignty in the Postcolony."

Walter Benjamin famously insisted that modern police wielded a "ghostly," all-pervasive violence, called upon at points where the state was unable to govern by legal means. Yet many African postcolonies are haunted by a different specter: the waning efficacy of enforcement, the ambiguity of authority, and the apparent abandonment of subjects by the state. This paper, part of a larger work entitled "Policing the Postcolony," examines the problematic relation of law, theology, and sovereignty in contemporary African polities, especially in post-apartheid South Africa. It focuses on the "metaphysics of disorder" that is palpable in popular culture here, and the kinds of forensic fetishes that seem to be conjured in its wake.

Thursday, April 7th

Culture and Medicine Symposium

4:00 - 6:00 Mandel Atrium

The symposium will feature undergraduate and graduate student research  pertaining broadly to medicine and culture, displayed through poster  presentations.   Several Brandeis faculty members will also speak about their medicine- and  health-related research.  Refreshments will be served.

For more details including student papers, click here.

Friday, April 8th

Greater Boston Anthropology Consortium Student Conference.

Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Brandeis University

Friday, April 15th

2nd Annual Anthropology Research Symposium

4:40-8:45, Brown 316

Join Anthropology faculty and graduate students as they discuss their research presented at Anthropology and Archaeology conferences this past year. Please join us to listen and discuss faculty and graduate research.

To download a full list of paper abstracts, click here.

Refreshments provided.

Thursday, April 28th

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Elizabeth Greenspan (Harvard University)

3:30 pm

"Clashing Voices: The Battle over Language at Ground Zero."

Since the very first days after the 9/11 attacks, Ground Zero has been a charged and controversial public square.  This paper explores how battles to define the World Trade Center site's future have often doubled as contests over language and speech - contests to control who may, and may not, speak, and which narratives may, and may not, be told.  I examine how groups and institutions have manipulated narratives of 9/11 at the WTC site to advance and mask their financial and political agendas.  And I explore the varied, and contradictory, consequences of these efforts.  In multiple instances, institutionalized narratives have undermined the same agendas they were designed to advance.  Examination of these battles reveals the evolution, and growing containment, of American public discourse of 9/11 since the attacks nearly a decade ago.

Elizabeth Greenspan is an urban anthropologist and lecturer at Harvard University. This talk is based upon her on-going research in New York City, which Liz began in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.  Liz received a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006. Her article on the most recent work has been published in The Atlantic).

2009-2010 Colloquia Series

Thursday, September 17

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Megan McCullough

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

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 wellP 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"

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?"

Thursday, October 22

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Alex Weingrod

"The New Israeli Minorities"

Friday, October 23, 2009

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

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

Co-sponsored by the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Eighth Annual Saler Lecture in Religious Studies

Robert Weller speaks on "Ritual and the Rhythms of Ambiguity"

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

"Laws of Love and Madness: Sex and Law in Indian Psychiatry”

Sarah Pinto is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, author of "Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India" (Berghahn 2008) and co-editor of "Postcolonial Disorders" (University of California 2008).  She is currently interested in the intersections of medicine, law and kinship, and is researching women's psychiatric care in north India.

Friday, February 26, 2010

GBAC Distinguished Lecture: Laura Nader

Clark University, Worcester

Laura Nader is a Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Nader's current work focuses on how central dogmas are made and how they work in law, energy science, and anthropology. Harmony, Ideology—Injustice and Control in a Mountain Zapotec Village (1990) and The Life of the Law: Anthropological Projects (2002) and (with Ugo Mattei) Plunder - When the Rule of Law is Illegal (2008) indicate a wide range of interests in law that has moved from village sites into national and international arenas. Energy Choices in a Democratic Society (1980) is the initial work that has continued on in the area of energy and resources culminating in Naked Science—Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge (1996). This work reflects a theoretical perspective that crosses disciplinary boundaries. Essays in Controlling Processes (1994, 1996, 2002) is ongoing work that attempts to synthesize contemporary work on power and control. Her films To Make the Balance and the PBS film Little Injustices are widely disseminated. Nader is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Aren Maeir

"Canaanites, Philistines, Israelites and Crusaders: The excavations at Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel"

Thursday, March 25, 2010

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

"Solid Work and Rash Experiments: The Imperative to Comparison in the Agro-Ecology of Africa"

Jane I. Guyer is George Armstrong Kelly Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University. Educated at the London School of Economics and the University of Rochester, she has carried out field research in Nigeria and Cameroon, and taught at Harvard, Boston, Northwestern and Johns Hopkins Universities. The theme of the lecture comes from research carried out between 1968 and the present in Nigeria. The other major theme of her research has been the culture and history of money and wealth, including several papers on wealth-in-people; Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa, (University of Chicago Press 2004); and Cultures of Monetarism (a collection of papers,http://anthropology.jhu.edu/Jane_Guyer/CultureMonetarism).

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Matthew J. Liebmann

"'Now the God of the Spaniards is Dead': The Archaeology of Pueblo Revolution and Revitalization in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico"

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Anthropology Colloquium Series: Maoz Azaryahu

"The White City of Tel Aviv"

In 2003 UNESCO inscribed the White City of Tel Aviv – "an outstanding architectural ensemble of the Modern Movement… built from the early 1930s until the 1950s" – on the prestigious list of World Heritage Sites. The conventional story of the White City of Tel Aviv is the architectural history of the Modern Movement in the city. It focuses on the built heritage of the International Style, known locally as Bauhaus, and its conservation. On a different level, however, the story of the White City of Tel Aviv is also the cultural history of a place-image that involved the transformation of a casual reference to the color of the city into a poetic metaphor and finally into an officially promoted brand name associated with Tel Aviv's Bauhaus architecture.

Maoz Azaryahu is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Haifa. He has written extensively on urban landscapes, memory, and society, and has recently published Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City (2006). He has been a visiting professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Penn State University, and Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada. During Spring 2010, he is a visiting scholar with the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and will teach two courses in the Anthropology Department.

Co-sponsored by the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies.