Anthropology Talks and Events, 2010 - 2011

The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce the following featured events and colloquia.

2011 ANTHROPOLOGY TALK

AFTER THE QUAKE:   JAPAN RESEARCHERS DISCUSS JAPAN’S CURRENT CATASTROPHE AND CONSIDERATIONS FOR CANADA

March 22nd Tuesday 11:30-1:00    Venue:  ANSO 134

Bruce White, Anthropologist from Doshisha University in Japan,

joins UBC and Vancouver based panel of

Millie Creighton, Kozue Matsumoto, Dada Docot, Larissa Dziubenko, and Greg Masuda

to discuss Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and radiation disaster and researching on a fault line

While the world watches and awaits further news of the extent of Japan’s earthquake, tsunami, and radioactivity disaster in Northeastern (Tohoku region) Japan along with its impact on other areas of Japan, this panel presents insights from those with research or related experience in Japan on the current situation and on working, living, and researching in Japan as an earthquake prone country. The speakers include, Professor Bruce White an anthropologist and Japan specialist from Doshisha University, who was in Japan at the time of the earthquake, Professor Millie Creighton a Japan specialist in the Anthropology Department at UBC who has done research in the affected Sendai area and who was in Kobe directly following Japan’s previous great earthquake there, Dr. Kozue Matsumoto, who recently received her Ph.D. from UBC and is from the Tohoku area–centre of the current great earthquake,  resulting tsunami and nuclear concerns, Ms. Dada Docot a Ph.D. student focusing on Japan in the Department of Anthropology at UBC who lived in Tokyo, Japan while doing her MA work, Ms. Larissa Dziubenko, an undergraduate student in at UBC, who recently spent a year at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan and is a current applicant to return to Japan, and Mr. Greg Masuda a volunteer for Tonari Gumi, the long-term NGO assisting Japanese Canadians and Japanese in the Vancouver area, and on the Executive Committee of the BC-Japan Earthquake Relief fund.

Panelists will share their stories of experiencing the earthquake in Japan, and/or the areas affected, and their knowledge and perceptions of working and researching in Japan with the awareness of possible earthquakes and other forces such as tsunami, and typhoons.

Everyone is welcome to attend and engage with the panelists in this interactive forum on the current crisis in Japan.

www.calendar.events.ubc.ca/s/rZ

2011 Spring Colloquia Series

Thursday, January 20th       11:30-1:00       ANSO 134
Susan Erikson (Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University)
Global Health Business: The Production and Work of Health Statistics in Sierra Leone and Germany

The global push for health statistics and electronic digital health information systems is about more than tracking disease prevalence. It is also experienced on the ground as means to develop and maintain particular forms of global knowledge, decision- and profit-making that are not innocent.  "The numbers" make possible actuarial and audit logics that undergird the management of health at a distance and which are increasingly necessary to neoliberal healthcare schematics.  In this colloquium, we discuss how health statistics operate as transnational artifacts in the business of global health.  Ethnographic and descriptive data from two very different countries, Sierra Leone and Germany, show how statistics simultaneously are produced and produce the business of global health.  In both cases, numbers are not quite what they seem, and shape and are shaped by social, political, and economic contexts.  Health statistics are shown to be inextricable from their social milieus, despite operating in global health as if they are freely formed and objective.  The talk is based on living and working in Sierra Leone for two years, and anthropological fieldwork in hospitals and other places in Germany over a ten year period.

Thursday, February 3rd       11:30-1:00      ANSO 134
Sonja Luehrmann (Killam Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology, UBC)
Holy Innocence: Sin, Childraising, and Memory in Russian Orthodox Anti-Abortion Activism

After decades of being the most accessible method of fertility control, abortion is becoming contentious in post-Soviet Russia in the context of religious revival and publicized concern over a national “demographic crisis.” Based on fieldwork at a Russian Orthodox pregnancy consultation center in St. Petersburg, this paper explores how reframing past actions in the idiom of sin becomes a source of moral authority in post-Soviet appropriations of transnational pro-life activism. Since a majority of the pension-aged women who make up the bulk of Russian Orthodox churchgoers have had several abortions during their reproductive lifespans, anti-abortion activism is often a form of penance for past abortions. As female activists present themselves as virtuous mothers and grandmothers who are also grave sinners, Orthodox Christian teachings about sin and penitence combine with psychological debates about “post-abortion syndrome” to create a circumscribed space of gendered moral agency. While women in Russia generally have fewer opportunities than men to derive authority from the ability to confront moral ambiguity, demographic concerns make reproduction and childraising a sphere where women’s fraught decisions gain public weight. At a time when Russian citizens are rarely encouraged to think critically about their Soviet past, practices of confession and penance at once demand and contain critical memory, making moral ambiguity useable for political life by reducing it to a tolerable level.

Thursday, February 24th      11:30-1:00      ANSO 134
Jean-Jacques Hublin (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany)

Neandertals deciphered

Neandertals were the first fossil hominins discovered and, since then, have been the most studied.However, it is only in the last two decades that entirely new techniques have made fascinating insights into their biology and behavior possible. Beyond their odd anatomy, we are now able to explore the mechanisms of their birth and growth or the way their brains developed. The decoding of their genome has opened a new era in Paleoanthropology. The debates surrounding the Neandertals are captivating because they are so close and so different from us. 
Ultimately, understanding the rise and the fall of the Neandertals will help us to elucidate the unrivaled evolutionary success of our own species.

Tuesday, March 29th         12:00-1:30           Liu Institute for Global Issues
Nicole Constable (University of Pittsburgh)

Telling Tales of Migrant Workers: Religion, Activism, and Women's Narratives
Professor Constable’s visit is organized by the Border Crossings Consortium, and co-sponsored by the Liu Center for Global Issues and the Departments of Anthropology, Geography, and Sociology.

Wednesday, March 30th         3:00-4:00           Liu Institute for Global Issues (RSVP required)
Transnational Praxis Workshop: "Birth Rights: Migrant Children on the Margins"

2011 Hawthorn Lecture in Anthropology

Thursday, March 3rd      11:30-1:00      Asian Centre Auditorium      
Marshall Sahlins (University of Chicago)

Stranger-Kings, Enemy Heads, Affinal Kin, and Other Foreign Riches:   The Alterity of Power and Vice-Versa
Since the eighteenth century, anthropology has been implicated in a major theoretical scandal. Although the world over, local societies have been culturally fashioned through their interdependent engagements with near and distant others, anthropological paradigms of every variety--whether functionalist, Marxist, evolutionary or structuralist--have supposed that cultures are self-fashioned through one or another internal dynamic. Rather than taking cultures as sui generis, this lecture focuses in intercultural relations of order and change, with special attention to the planetary distribution of stranger-king formations as one among several such phenomena of the alterity of power--and the power of alterity.

Friday, March 4th       4:00-5:30      Buchanan A201     
Marshall Sahlins (University of Chicago)

Only Apes Have "Human Nature”
For more than two millenia we in the West have been haunted by the spectre of our own inner being : an apparition of human nature so avaricious and contentious that unless it is somehow governed it will reduce society to anarchy. I claim this is a specifically Western nightmare, for it supposes an opposition of culture and nature that is distinctive of our own folklore and our native Social Science-and contrastive to the many peoples who consider beasts are basically human rather than humans are basically beasts. Indeed it is not even true of our kinship relations which, like those of other societies the world over, involve mutualities of being and belonging that entail intersubjective commonalities of experience and interest beyond all sense of individual self concern. Kinsmen are people who live each other's lives and die each other's deaths. Recent experiments show that the roots of this symbolic capacity of mutuality already exist in infants of nine to 12 months-- but are unknown to great apes, who rather singularly concerned with their own existence.

~All are welcome~

~Refreshments and reception will follow~

Fall 2010 Colloquia Series

Thursday, Sept 30th 11:30-1:00    ANSO 134
Laurel Kendall (American Museum of Natural History)                            
Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion
Thirty years ago, anthropologist Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork among South Korea's (mostly female) shamans and their clients as a reflection of village women's lives. In the intervening decades, South Korea experienced an unprecedented economic, social, political, and material transformation and Korean villages all but disappeared. And the shamans? Kendall attests that they not only persist but are very much a part of South Korean modernity. In this presentation Kendall describes some of the changes and personal experiences that prompted her to write SHAMANS, NOSTALGIAS, AND THE IMF and presents selections from her new book.

Co-sponsored by Centre for Korean Research and Department of Asian Studies.

Friday, Oct 1st 11:30-1:00      Michael Ames Theatre at MOA
Carla Sinopoli (University of Michigan)                  
Documenting Large and Small Histories in Late Prehistoric South India: Scalar views from and to Kadebakele
The first millennium BCE in southern India was a time of remarkable change – in material practices and technologies and in social, political, and ideological structures and relations. In numerous locations throughout the South, emergent economic and political inequalities played a role in the creation of small regional polities. In this talk, I examine one such polity – centered at the settlement site of Kadebakele in northern Karnataka, where our excavations have focused since 2003. I view Kadebakele from several scales: beginning with the highly localized small scale local ritual sequences that helped to shape local histories within the settlement and ending with a consideration the material practices and dynamics that connected and differentiated communities across much of southern India.

Tuesday, Oct 5th 11:30-1:00      ANSO 134
Sarah Nelson (University of Denver)                     
Shamans, Gender and Leadership in Ancient East Asia
Many archaeological sites in East Asia are said to be related to shamanism. How do we recognize shamans in archaeology? What do shamans have to do with leadership? How do we understand the relationship to the past of the many forms of shamanism in this region today? How does shamanism relate to gender? This research sorts out the tangled threads of shamans, gender and leadership from an archaeological perspective.

Thursday, Nov. 4th 11:30-1:00            ANSO 134
Teresa Macias (University of Victoria)              
"Tortured Bodies": Speaking Terror and the Epistemic Violence of the Chilean Commission on Torture and Political Imprisonment
In 2003, the Chilean state instituted the Valech Commission and Political Imprisonment and Torture as an initiative to officially account for the legacies of human rights violations left by the authoritarian regime of Augusto Pinochet, and to perfect human rights policies originally initiated with the Rettig Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission. Conceived as a strategy to provide a space for survivors to share their experiences, receive state recognition and qualify for compensation, the commission heard about 37,000 testimonies during the 6 months of its mandate. 27,000 of these cases were officially recognized as cases of torture. In this presentation, I analyze torture debates in Chile, including the Valech Report, tracing how a truth about torture is constructed from the testimonies of survivors. Using a Foucaultian framework, I trace the relationship between torture experiences and politics of representation arguing that the Valech Report constitutes a prime example of epistemological violence re-inflicted on torture survivors under the disguise of recognition and legitimization. I interrogate the relationship between national interests, especially national reconciliation agendas, and the interests of victims of state violence arguing that national interests have a fundamental influence in processes by which nations account for state-organized violence. I propose that the Chilean case provide important ethical and political warnings for any study of national process of recognition and for demands on the part of survivors of state violence.

2010 Hawthorn Lecture in Anthropology:

Thursday, Oct 14th 11:30-1:00     Michael Ames Theatre at MOA
Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge University)              
What's in an Argument? Preliminary Reflections on Knowledge Exchanges
Pacific Island academics would wish anthropologists to be explicit about 'knowledge exchange'. Knowledge transfers take innumerable forms; in the case of the anthropologist, however, it often seems that expert knowledge is more taken than given. Thinking comparatively about academic practice, is there any future for potential 'exchanges' as forms of interdisciplinarity, say, or of argument between points of view? This Lecture takes the concept of an academic argument to ask about its counterparts in non-academic milieux of knowledge-making in one part of the Pacific.
Co-sponsored by the Museum of Anthropology

~All are welcome~

~Refreshments and reception will be served following colloquia, in the ANSO lounge~