This event is hosted by the Departments of Botany and Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History in collaboration with the United States Botanic Garden and supported by the Cuatrecasas Family Foundation.
The Ninth Annual Smithsonian Botanical Symposium
September 24-25, 2010, Washington, DC
Continue reading “Food For Thought: 21st Century Perspectives on Ethnobotany”
From the Canadian Anthropological Society blog:
Call for a new boundary crossing network: Anthropology and Mobility
Convenor: Noel B. Salazar
Mobility, as a concept-metaphor, captures the common impression that
people’s life-worlds are in constant flux, with not only persons
(including anthropologists), but also cultures, objects, capital,
businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information, and ideas
circulating across (and even beyond) the planet. Among anthropologists,
it is fashionable these days to study tourism, migration, diaspora, and
exile; cosmopolitanism and transnationalism; global markets and
commodity chains; and global information and communication technologies,
media, and popular culture. The literature is replete with metaphorical
conceptualizations attempting to describe perceived altered spatial and
temporal movements: deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and
scapes; time-space compression, distantiation, or punctuation; the
network society and its space of flows; the death of distance and the
acceleration of modern life; and nomadology. The interest in mobility
goes hand in hand with theoretical approaches that reject a sedentarist
metaphysics in favour of a nomadic one and empirical studies on diverse
mobilities, questioning taken-for-granted correspondences between
peoples, places, and cultures.While anthropologists traditionally tended to ignore or regard
border-crossing movements as deviations from normative place-bound
communities, cultural homogeneity, and social integration, the
discourses of globalization and cosmopolitanism of the 1990s shifted the
pendulum in the opposite direction, mobility often being promoted as
normality, and (too much) place attachment a digression or resistance
against globalizing forces. At the same time, critically engaged
anthropologists were among the first to point out that not all
mobilities are valued equally positively and that the very processes and
regimes that produce trans-border movements also result in geographical
and social immobility.This new scholarly network aims to facilitate theoretical and
methodological exchanges on anthropology and mobility. What is the
analytical purchase of (im)mobility as a conceptual framework to study
and understand the current human condition? What are the most adequate
methods to research objects of study “on the move”? The network will not
only foster intellectually stimulating debates among anthropologists
working on mobility along various thematic and conceptual lines, but
will also create exciting opportunities for collaborative research and
publications.We kindly invite everyone interested to attend our first network
meeting, which will be held during the 11th EASA Biennial Conference in
Maynooth, Ireland (24-27th August). The meeting will take place on
Wednesday, 25 August, from 20.00 until 21.30.
From our friends at American University, via the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists (WAPA):
The 7th Annual AU Public Anthropology Conference
Registration deadline: September 12
Join us for a revolutionizing conference as we work towards building coalitions across diverse social justice movements. We invite community activists, practicing and academic anthropologists and other social scientists, students, filmmakers and interested individuals to join us for two days of collaborative discussions and strategizing about how to better organize and collaborate across various sectors and disciplines to create new social justice alliances. Participants are encouraged to share experiences and insights from environmental, labor, liberation, LGBTQI, peace, anti-racism, anti-displacement, feminist, indigenous rights, health, disability rights, fair trade, and other social justice movements.
Unlike many academic events built around formal papers, this conference will focus on bringing panelists and audience members together to discuss concrete ways social scientists can support, strengthen, and contribute to activist movements striving toward progressive political action. The conference will include panel sessions (structured discussion of ideas), skills workshops (presenters teaching concrete skills to audience members), and a film festival.
Please submit abstracts (one-paragraph descriptions) of what you are interested in presenting or a film you made and would like to show at the conference. Panelists and Skills Workshop presenters will be selected by a group of students and faculty to ensure the conference reflects a diverse array of social movements, backgrounds, and experiences. The submission deadline is September 12; participants will be notified of acceptance on a rolling admissions basis.
PLEASE SUBMIT: one-paragraph abstracts to AUPublicAnthro@gmail.com
for panel sessions, skills workshops, or films.
DOWNLOAD: Call for Participants
11th Annual Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium
July 22 – 24, 2010
85 Main Street
Bucksport, Maine
From the official press release:
Among the presenters are your AMIA-list associates Jennifer Jenkins, University of Arizona; Ross Lipman, UCLA Film & Television Archive; J. Fred MacDonald, and Paul Spehr.
The NHF Summer Symposium is a multi-disciplinary gathering devoted to the history, theory, and preservation of moving images. Registration is open to the public and to media professionals, teachers, and students. The evening programs and day-long sessions provide the opportunity to exchange opinions and insights with participants from all over North America, including students from the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program.
The event will begin for registrants on Thursday, July 22 with a reception and screening of Wabanaki Film and Video, archival selections from Northeast Historic Film. The closing session on Saturday afternoon is Language Keepers, a National Science Foundation-funded Documenting Endangered Languages Program. The Language Keepers series captures current conversations in Passamaquoddy-Maliseet at the Pleasant Point Reservation in Eastport, Maine. grams to an online dictionary.
Symposium organizers are Snowden Becker, School of Information at the University of Texas, Austin; and Janna Jones and Mark Neumann, School of Communication, Cinema and Visual Culture Program at Northern Arizona University.
Contact: Jessica Hosford, External Affairs Director, Northeast Historic Film.
Via the always fascinating Somatosphere blog, an announcement about an upcoming conference:
“Medical Anthropology in Europe: Shaping the Field”
June 1-2, Oxford, UK
“Medical anthropology has just as long a history in Europe as in North America. However, European medical anthropologists are often unknown in Britain. One reason is that they often do not write in English or only sporadically. Perhaps, precisely due to the different languages, different medical anthropological perspectives have had time to gain some maturity and develop into sometimes quite distinctive schools. After the first RAI conference on ‘Medical Anthropology in Britain Today’ in September 2007, this second RAI conference will invigorate our own medical anthropological teaching and research by getting to know and interacting with mostly, but not exclusively, European colleagues.”
Hosted by the Royal Anthropological Institute. Full program available here.
“Mother’s Day Paint Job,” creative commons licensed on Flickr.
One day out of 365? Not good enough.
Anthropologists have analyzed some annual holidays such as Mardi Gras in the West and Holi among Hindus in South Asia. They often involve “inversion.”
In Mardi Gras, people have a riotously good time in ways not normally accepted. Sexuality is emphasized. Some participants cross-dress.
During Holi, people get smashed on bhang, a powerful hash milkshake. In villages, low caste people pour buckets of urine on high caste people. Women beat their husbands with brooms.
Interestingly, these important holidays, like Mother’s Day, occur in the spring. Some aspects of Mother’s Day indicate that it is a ritual of reversal, though of a more quiet kind that Mardi Gras or Holi.
The functional theory of reversal rituals or holidays relies on the model of a pressure cooker. The pressure cooker model says that a reversal ritual allows a period of time, often just a day, within which people get a break from their normal roles and routine. Having experienced a release from the pressure, they go back to the same old same old for another 364 days.
My casually collected evidence for how Mother’s Day is marked in the United States reveals aspects of reversal in gift-giving, especially taking mom out for a meal, remembering her with a greeting card or a long distance phone call if you can’t visit her. These gifts constitute important reversals in terms of two core aspects of motherhood around the world: meal provision and care through communication.
Does Mother’s Day, as celebrated in the United States at least, fit the pressure cooker model? Such may be the unconscious hope of many children: okay, mom, I took you out for brunch and gave you a card, so be happy.
My hope is that all of us, born of a mother who cared for us, know that a ratio of 1/365 is not good enough by half. While further research is needed, my hunch is that the expectations for Mother’s Day is the bottom line. You have to do something–at least make a phone call. If not you are in deep trouble.
But that which is necessary is by no means sufficient.
Blogger’s note: Wikipedia’s entry on Mother’s Day around the world is worth a visit.
To our Washington-area readers out there, the Culture in Global Affairs Program and the Global Women’s Forum at the Elliott School of International Affairs are hosting our final event of Spring 2010 this Thursday evening:
Dr. Reena Patel
Drawing from her newly released book, Working the Night Shift, Reena Patel will talk about how call center employment affects the lives of women workers, mainly as it relates to the anxiety that Indian families and Indian society have towards women going out at night, earning a good salary, and being exposed to western culture. From remarks such as “Call center job equals call girl job!” to concern about how night shift employment will affect a woman’s worth on the arranged marriage market, Patel explores the ironic and, at times, unsettling experiences of women who enter the spaces and places made accessible through call center work.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
1957 E Street NW, Room 505
To RSVP, click here.
Please join us for an event next week on April 8 at the Elliott School of International Affairs, part of GW’s new Global Women’s Initiative:
Global Women’s Forum:
Global Women 2020: Challenges and Priorities over the Next Decade
Thursday, April 8, 2010
6:00 – 7:15 pm
1957 E Street NW, Lindner Family Commons (Room 602)
Katherine Blakeslee, Director, Office of Women in Development,
U.S. Agency for International Development
Mayra Buvinic, Senior Director, Gender and Development, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management, The World Bank
Kathleen Kuehnast, Gender Advisor, Gender and Peacebuilding Initiative,
U.S. Institute of Peace
Alyse Nelson, President and CEO, Vital Voices Global Partnership
Moderator:
Barbara Miller, Chair, GW Global Women’s Initiative; Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University
Please RSVP at Global Women 2020
Sponsored by the Elliott School of International Affairs
Guest post by Anna Applefield
Global Pulse 2010 is a 3-day on-line “global conversation” on a variety of topics pertaining to development, including entrepreneurship, global health, education, and the comparative advantages of global or local approaches. It is hosted by the U.S. Agency for International Development and led by experts in their respective fields. Its aim is to take the “pulse” of the world by posing questions and allowing participants to comment, respond to each other, and generate a conversation.
It’s not too late for you to join the conversation: it continues through March 31. Go to the forum’s website. Choose a subject or issue and then select a more focused discussion. Each focused discussion begins with a question that is posed by an expert. Individuals can comment on the response and then start a thread of conversation. The cumulative effect is an array of simultaneous conversations on any one topic.
People participating in the various conversations appear to come from diverse backgrounds, both professionally and regionally. For example, in a thread about of “global citizenship” vs. national citizenship, I read posts from university students, small business owners, and NGO and government employees representing Egypt, Morocco, Australia, Belgium, Jordan, and the United States. While the individual comments themselves are interesting, it is even more impressive to see extremely varied perspectives come together in a cohesive discussion.
Join in!
Anna Applefield earned her BA from Skidmore College and is currently pursuing her MA in International Development Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.
Very interesting event over at George Mason University this week. Everyone’s welcome – this is not to be missed:
James Der Derian (Brown University) will screen and discuss his co-directed film:
Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic
Thursday March 25, 2010
4:30 p.m.
George W. Johnson Center, Room F
George Mason University
4400 University Drive
Fairfax, Virginia
anthropologyworks 