Brandeis Anthropology Research Seminar (BARS)
The Brandeis Anthropology Research Seminar (BARS) is a weekly yearlong seminar that meets on Fridays at 2:30 pm in Schwartz 103 (except where noted below). The series includes anthropology colloquia presented by invited guests and Brandeis anthropology faculty, alternating with workshops, reading groups and presentations by graduate students. For more information, contact anthropology@brandeis.edu.
Anthropology Welcome Reception
September 5, 2025
Time: 4-5 pm
Location: Schwartz 103 and the adjoining foyer
Preparing and Presenting Conference Papers
with Beth Derderian, Brian Horton and Sargam Sharma
September 19, Schwartz 103
Preparing Successful PhD Applications
with Janet McIntosh and Sarah Lamb
September 26, Schwartz 103
Colloquium: Pinky Hota, Smith College
Ecofantasy as Indigenous Erasure: Conservation and Tourism in Adivasi India
October 3, Schwartz 103
This talk focuses on conservation and tourism efforts in indigenous geographies in India. In Odisha, adivasis speak of themselves as less-than-animal to articulate their rights within a local landscape shaped by charismatic species conservation and ecotourism. Tracing a unifying logic that continues from state as agent of ecological destruction and state as ecological steward is a morphed capitalist logic predicated on indigenous displacement and erasure, I describe how where once lands were subject to aggressive development, they are now subject to a new form of nature capitalism in which a carefully cultivated nature is commodified, including through the introduction of charismatic species. In such a context, adivasis describe themselves as less valuable than animals to the government to draw attention to their rights, emphasizing the continuities between extraction and ecotourism.
Writing Grants
with Sarah Lamb and Yesmar Oyarzun
October 10, Schwartz 103
Colloquium: Michael Berman, Brandeis University
Heart of a Heartless World: Alienation, Compassion, and the Negative in the Making of Secular Japan
October 24, Schwartz 103
Michael Berman will be reading the prologue and portions of the introduction of his book manuscript, Heart of a Heartless World, an ethnography that traces histories of the work done by religious professionals in Japan after the 2011 tsunami and earthquake. The manuscript intervenes in academic and popular conversations on the nature of alienation and compassion by arguing that they produce each other. Simply stated, Heart of a Heartless World argues that a transformation of compassion into altruism breaks down long-standing institutions of belonging, including, surprisingly, organized religions. Aimed at anthropologists and critical theorists interested in alienation, religion/secularism, and Japanese studies, the book develops the analytic framework of “negative semiotics” to demonstrate that voluntarily sharing suffering not only hurts, it can also drive people apart in the very ways that it brings them together. During the Q&A, Berman will also be happy to share reflections on the fieldwork and writing process for this book.
Book talk: Casey Golomski (Brandeis PhD ‘13), University of New Hampshire
God's Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life's End—from immersive fieldwork to creative nonfiction
November 7, 2025, Schwartz 103
Can older racists change their tune, or will they haunt us further once they're gone? Rich in mystery and life's lessons, God's Waiting Room (Rutgers U Press, and Wits U Press)—a 2025 awardee of the Victor Turner Prizes in Ethnographic Writing—considers what matters in the end for older white adults and the younger Black nurses who care for them. An innovation in creative ethnographic nonfiction, Casey Golomski's story of his years of immersive research at a nursing home in South Africa, thirty years after the end of apartheid, is narrated as a one-day, room-by-room tour. For BARS, he’ll share both overall findings and the creative process and toast to Brandeis Anthropology colleagues that helped to make it happen.
Colloquium: Gareth Doherty, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design
November 14, Schwartz 103
Landscape fieldwork combines landscape architects’ projective skills and tools for site analysis (drawing, measuring, photographing, remote sensing) with the ethnographic methods of anthropologists (participant observation, unstructured interviews, and writing reflexive fieldnotes), all as an integral part of a design process. When we do thick description, it leads us to thick prescription. Gareth Doherty takes a human-centered approach to design and theory that aspires to shape environmentally and socially just landscapes—drawing on research on designed landscapes across the postcolonial and Islamic worlds, primarily in the Arabian Peninsula, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the African continent. Doherty is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Affiliate of the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.