Captives: Stolen People in the Ancient World - Dr. Catherine M. Cameron
Monday May 8 from 7:00-8:30pm at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Ricketson Auditorium
Captives were remarkably common in ancient times. Societies of all levels of complexity took captives, most commonly women and children. Archaeologists largely overlook captives as social actors, yet captives almost certainly transformed many of the societies they unwillingly joined. Captives were important sources of social and economic power for their captors, even in small-scale societies. Using cross-cultural comparison and analogy I will explore the substantial impacts captives had on captor society. I emphasize that the presence of captives should disabuse archaeologists of ever imagining that small-scale societies were “egalitarian” and suggest ways we can investigate links between captives and power.
Colorado Archaeological Society’s Denver Chapter
- Sex, Society and the Patriarchal Tendency, Department Colloquium.
Eric C Thompson Associate Professor, Dept of Sociology, National University of Singapore
4pm, Friday, April 28 in Hale 230
Abstract
In this talk, I will discuss the following thesis: (hetero)sexual exchange dynamics of human reproduction are a key factor in explaining the patriarchal tendency of human societies. The patriarchal tendency refers to the fact that all recorded human societies occupy a spectrum from the more-or-less gender egalitarian to the decidedly patriarchal. The book, on which this presentation is based, is an attempt to explain why human societies fall within this range (and the corollary absence of matriarchal societies). The presentation will focus on three elements of the argument: (1) an overview of the patriarchal tendency, (2) why I position sexual exchange as a central explanation of the tendency, and (3) the consequences of a sexual exchange theory of the patriarchal tendency. In particular, I discuss the implications of my arguments for the liberal-individualist assumptions of contemporary feminist and gender theory. Furthermore, I propose that the goals of gender egalitarianism (gender equality) may be better served by drawing on models of actually existing gender egalitarian societies (e.g. those with matrilineal bias in inheritance) than on the abstract model of liberal-individualism.Eric C Thompson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. Before joining NUS, he completed a PhD in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of California Los Angeles. He teaches anthropology, gender studies, urban studies and research methods. His research spans field sites across Southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. His research interests include transnational networking, urbanism, agrarian transitions, and ASEAN regionalism. His work has appeared in the journals American Ethnologist, Current Anthropology, Urban Studies, Political Geography, Asian Studies Review, Contemporary Sociology, and Contemporary Southeast Asian Studies among others.
He is author of Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural Malaysia (NUS Press, 2007). He is co-editor of Cleavage, Connection and Conflict in Rural, Urban, and Contemporary Asia (Springer, 2012). -
Spring 2017 Ethnography in Progress Series
April 27: "Bad Blood" | 4 p.m., Hale 455
by Allison Formanack (PhD Candidate, Cultural Anthropology)
Discussant: Drew Zachary (PhD Student, Cultural Anthropology)
American cultural stereotypes consider “white trash” and “trailer trash,” both pejorative phrases, as synonymous; that is, “trailer trash” serves as a representational form of “white trash.” This under-examined notion is often reproduced in social science research on the interrelationship of housing, class, and place-based identities (e.g. Desmond 2016, Hartigan 2005, Isenburg 2016, McCarty 2010, Moss 2003). Operated as private businesses, informal (not to mention, illegal) racial discrimination practices existed in most “trailer parks” well into the 1980s, thus cementing both the parks’ class- and race-based associations for residents and the wider public. However, this same business model promising cheap housing with fewer regulations and scrutiny has made mobile homes a popular choice among newly-arrived immigrants, in particular Mexicans and Central Americans, since the 1990s (Hiemstra 2010, Kusenbach 2015, Nelson & Hiemstra 2008). As such, despite the continued use of “white/trailer trash” in popular discourse, in practice mobile home communities (MHCs) often have the most racial/ethnic diversity within a given region. In this dissertation chapter, I draw on ethnographic data collected in Crown Court MHC, located near downtown Lincoln, Nebraska, to examine the interconnections between demographic transition and racialized notions of place and belonging within a stigmatized space, the “trailer park.” Here, I consider how residents interpreted demographic and sensorial (alternatively, affective) changes in Crown Court relative to the persistent stigmas of being either “white trash” or “trailer trash.” Moreover, I show how being named “trailer trash” differently affects white and Latino/a residents, which reveals a discursive gap between this concept and “white trash.” Exploring both the conceptual overlap and distinctiveness of “white trash” and “trailer trash,” I argue, illustrates how certain unstable (or ambiguous, amorphous, placeless) identities are negotiated, contested, and materialized in specific places.
- AIA Lecture: From the Ashes: The Lost History of Aztec Ruins
Wednesday April 26 from 7:00-8:30pm at the CU Museum of Natural History
Erin Baxter (PhD ’16) presents how recent research into Morris’ museum archive is radicalizing our views of Aztec. We now know it as the once-capital of Southwestern civilization which rose and fell in an explosion of political upheaval, aberrant behavior, violence and fire. This talk will explore unpublished diaries, letters, photos, and maps that give tantalizing clues to Aztec’s complex history and reveals the emergence of social inequality, the role of violence and conflict, and the development of larger scales of political organization during one of the most important chapters in Ancestral Pueblo history. - Ethnography. Not Just Another Qualitative Method
A faculty-graduate student seminar, Agenda
Friday, April 21 9am - 3:30pm Hale Science Building, 4th Floor
- Coffee & Donuts with Anthropology Professors Carla Jones & Joanna Lambert
ANTH Majors & Minors are invited to drop by for some coffee talk. Everyone welcome!
Wednesday, April 12 from 9:00-11:00am in Hale 450
- Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable, Department Colloquium.
Karen Barad Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness University of California at Santa Cruz
4pm, Friday, April 7 in Hale 270, Reception to follow
In this public talk, Karen Barad diffractively reads insights from quantum theory and Kyoko Hayashi’s first-hand accounts of Nagasaki bombing through one another, bringing to the fore a troubling of scalar distinctions between the world of subatomic particles and that of colonialism, war, and environmental destruction. Attempting to think through what possibilities remain open for an embodied re-membering of the past against the colonialist practices of erasure and the related desire to set time aright, Barad calls for thinking a certain undoing of time, a work of mourning accountable to those most profoundly affected by ongoing ecological destruction and by racist, colonialist, and nationalist violence, human and otherwise. This task is related to rethinking the notion of the void. Against its Newtonian interpretation as the absence of matter and energy, as that which does not matter and thus works to justify colonial occupation, Barad argues that the QFT void is a spectral domain where life and death are originarily entangled, and inanimate matter itself gives itself to be thought in its mortal finitude. The void is rather the yearning and the imagining of what might have been, and thus also the infinitely rich ground of imagining possibilities for living and dying otherwise.
Karen Barad (Ph.D., Theoretical Particle Physics, SUNY Stony Brook) is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad's Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. Barad's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Barad is the Co-Director of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at UCSC.
For further information please
contact:Professor Kate Goldfarb (Kathryn.Goldfarb@Colorado.edu; 303-492-1589) or
Professor Arthur Joyce (Arthur.Joyce@Colorado.edu; 303-735-3055)
- TRIPOD: MEAD, BATESON, BALI
A mixed media documentary performance about ethnography, art, purpose, and the systems in which we find ourselves. The performance illustrates Bateson's theory of the ecology of mind, challenging us to think of the self as a relation - a nexus of information pathways that are located both within and beyond the body.
Friday, April 7 Two shows: 4:30pm and 7:30pm in Old Main Chapel. Admission is free, but seating is limited. All are welcome!
- Presentation and Conversation with Juana Alicia Ruiz
Community Leader of Mampuján and 2015 Winner of the Colombian Peace Prize
5:30-6:30pm, Thursday, April 6 Location Hale 230 Contact: Dani.merriman@colorado.edu
- Spring 2017 Brown Bag Schedule, 12pm Hale Science Building Reading Room 450.
Friday, March 17: Scott Ortman
The Social Reactors Project--Human Settlements and Networks in History
- Public Anthropology: Responding to Public Urgency - Graduate Colloquium Committee
an Invited Panel on Public Anthropology:
Friday, March 17 from 4pm in Hale 230
Reception to Follow in Hale 450Anthropologists writing at the dawn of the 21st century have been concerned with the discipline's attentiveness to timing and the 'unbearable slowness' of ethnography (Marcus 2003). Now, more than ever, in light of new policies, executive orders, a highly polarized political climate in the United States, and the resurgence of nativist and racist movements, many anthropologists are left wondering if there is a place for anthropology to respond to these events and if so, how the nature of fieldwork and writing fits into this response. In these times, we turn to public anthropologists — those who not only theorize and publish work for academics, but bridge their theory and method into a space that reacts to current events in meaningful ways and speaks to more than just an academic audience. During this panel and the discussion afterward, we will hear from scholars working on the ground and in print who use anthropology as a tool to fight back against injustice and ignorance. We are especially interested in starting conversations among anthropologists working and teaching in the state of Colorado. We hope to foster a multi-campus discussion that unites the Colorado anthropology community and speaks back to political dislocation.
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List of Speakers:
Professor Whitney Duncan (Department of Anthropology, University of Northern Colorado)
Professor Sarah Horton (Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Denver)
Professor Donna Goldstein (Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder)
Dr. Steve Nash (Department Chair and Curator of Archaeology, Denver Museum of Nature and Science; blogger, Sapiens)
Professor Bianca Williams (Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder) - Mayan Commoners and their Uncommon Lives
CU on the Weekend Outreach lecture with Payson Sheets
1pm - 4pm, Saturday, March 11 Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building, Butcher Auditorium
- MHA Nation Collaborative Film Project
Thursday, March 9 from 10:00-11:30am in the Paleo Hall CU Museum of Natural History Henderson Bldg. (15th & Broadway)
Please join us for Video presentations and Discussion with:
Justin Deegan, Thunder Revolutions Studio Justin will screen his 4 minute video about Standing Rock. For more about Justin and his work, see here
Elijah Benson, Nueta Language Initiative Elijah will screen short videos he has created for the Nueta (or Mandan) language revitalization program. For more about Elijah & his work, see here
Justin and Elijah are from the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara (MHA) Nation in North Dakota. They were facilitators in the MHA Collaborative Film Project’s community-based filmmaking workshops at the MHA Nation in summer 2016. The event will be an informal discussion with the filmmakers.
Please RSVP to ensure a spot around the table. Email jshannon@colorado.edu
MHACollabFilm is a partnership between the University of Colorado – Boulder and the Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College. For more information, visit our project website, email Jen Shannon at jshannon@colorado.edu or find us on Facebook at mhacollaborativefilm.
- Coffee & Donuts with Anthropology Professor Carole McGranahan
....Drop by for some coffee talk everyone welcome!
Tuesday, March 7 from 10:00-11:00am in Hale 450
- Remote Killing: Drones, Democracy and War
Hugh Gustserson, George Washington University, Department of Anthropology
Friday, March 3, 4:00pm in Atlas 100. Geography Department Colloquium
Saturday, March 4 symposium on the social/legal/ethical aspects of drones.
- 2017 CU Archaeological Field School Information meeting
Thursday, March 2 at 5:00pm Hale 450
- Spring 2017 Ethnography in Progress Series
February 15: from A House for Every Daughter" - Chapter 3: Tamil Matrilocal Marriage in Akkaraipattu" | 4 p.m., Hale 450
by Dennis McGilvray (Professor Emeritus, Cultural Anthropology)
Discussant: Anden Drolet (MA Student, Cultural Anthropology)
With the end of the civil war in 2009, I began a series of fieldwork trips (2010, 2011, 2012, 2014) to Akkaraipattu in eastern Sri Lanka where I have done research since 1969, specifically looking for young couples (both Hindu and Muslim) who were married since the 2004 tsunami. Because I had older field notes on marriage going back forty years, I hoped it would be possible to look at the marriage system longitudinally, and also to separate the older “matrilineal descent” questions from the more interesting new questions about persistent matrilocal residence and transfer of real property (houses, paddy lands) to women at marriage, regardless of matrilineal clan membership. At the same time, I was becoming more aware of similarities with matrilocal marriage practices in other parts of the island, as well as in coastal South India (Tamilnadu and Kerala) where I did 2 months of fieldwork in 2015. My book proposal is still being formulated, but I am thinking of organizing the chapters like this: 1. Introduction, 2. Issues & debates in South Asian marriage and dowry, 3. Tamil matrilocal marriage in Akkaraipattu, 4. Muslim (Moorish) matrilocal marriage in Akkaraipattu, 5. Matrilocal influences in other regions of Sri Lanka, 6. Matrilocal marriage along the South Indian coast, 7. Summary and conclusions.
The chunk you will be reading is a first draft of Ch. 3, containing the most detailed and vivid Tamil marriage case studies I gathered in Akkaraipattu. I’d love to hear criticisms and suggestions of any kind, but especially your questions about what I have not said, what contemporary anthropological issues I have not addressed but should – assuming I have the data to do so. Hopefully, by February 15, I will also have set up a photo exhibit in the 2nd floor Hale display case showing some of the people and places I talk about in my chapter.
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March 1: Is China a Settler Colonial State? Indigeneity and Tibet | 4 p.m., Hale 455
by Dawa Lotyitsang (PhD Student, Cultural Anthropology)
Discussant: Willi Lempert (PhD Candidate, Cultural Anthropology)
What does Asian settler colonialism look like? When looking over the literature regarding settler colonialism, majority of the literature draws its analysis from Euro-American examples. I’m interested in tracking settler colonialism in Asia, and more specifically, Chinese settler colonialism in the context of Tibet. My paper tracks Tibet’s invasion by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its eventual incorporation under the Chinese settler state. I argue that this incorporation took place following CCP’s construction of Tibet as an “autonomous region” with a settler governmentality which managed Tibet as a colony. Following the construction of a settler governmentality, Tibetans who were identified as sovereign Tibetan subjects before China’s invasion, began being constructed under the settler state as a Chinese “minority.” The construction of Tibet as an “autonomous region” and Tibetans as racialized minority Chinese, I argue, reveals China to be a settler colonial state. While current literature on China speaks to its economic and imperial moves across the globe, it barely touches the topic of China as a settler colonial state. My paper will attempt to do this.
March 15: "Friendship and Kinship: New Possibilities for Intimacy for Professional Women in Bangalore, India" | 4 p.m., IBS 290
by Rachel Fleming (PhD, Cultural Anthropology)
Discussant: Austin Sibley (PhD Student, Cultural Anthropology)
What does friendship have to do with intimacy? Can friends be as intimate as romantic partners and/or kin? What does intimacy mean? This article considers generational changes in how middle-class women in Bangalore perceive the role of friendship in their lives, especially as younger women take on professional identities and change how intimacy and kinship inform their sense of self.
April 13: "In the Time of Frost: Living with Death during El Niño in Highlands New Guinea" | 4 p.m., Hale 455 - CANCELLED
by Professor Jerry Jacka (Assistant Professor, Cultural Anthropology)
Discussant: Elijah Townsend (MA Student, Cultural Anthropology)
The system of weather known as El Niño brings extreme climatic anomalies to the Papua New Guinea highlands. Prolonged droughts accompanied by night-time frosts devastate subsistence gardens. In response, people migrate to lower altitude areas where kin and friends provide sustenance and social support. However, with increasing economic development and the demise of collective kin endeavors in the region, long-distance migration networks no longer offer people respite from food insecurity. In this paper, I examine the changes in social responses to El Niño-caused food shortages at varying scales – from subsistence farmers to international aid agencies – over the past 50 years. The paper explores how people learn to live with death and highlights the limits of resilience when customary social-ecological systems of adaptation intersect with international development efforts.
April 27: "Bad Blood" | 4 p.m., Hale 455
by Allison Formanack (PhD Candidate, Cultural Anthropology)
Discussant: Drew Zachary (PhD Student, Cultural Anthropology)
American cultural stereotypes consider “white trash” and “trailer trash,” both pejorative phrases, as synonymous; that is, “trailer trash” serves as a representational form of “white trash.” This under-examined notion is often reproduced in social science research on the interrelationship of housing, class, and place-based identities (e.g. Desmond 2016, Hartigan 2005, Isenburg 2016, McCarty 2010, Moss 2003). Operated as private businesses, informal (not to mention, illegal) racial discrimination practices existed in most “trailer parks” well into the 1980s, thus cementing both the parks’ class- and race-based associations for residents and the wider public. However, this same business model promising cheap housing with fewer regulations and scrutiny has made mobile homes a popular choice among newly-arrived immigrants, in particular Mexicans and Central Americans, since the 1990s (Hiemstra 2010, Kusenbach 2015, Nelson & Hiemstra 2008). As such, despite the continued use of “white/trailer trash” in popular discourse, in practice mobile home communities (MHCs) often have the most racial/ethnic diversity within a given region. In this dissertation chapter, I draw on ethnographic data collected in Crown Court MHC, located near downtown Lincoln, Nebraska, to examine the interconnections between demographic transition and racialized notions of place and belonging within a stigmatized space, the “trailer park.” Here, I consider how residents interpreted demographic and sensorial (alternatively, affective) changes in Crown Court relative to the persistent stigmas of being either “white trash” or “trailer trash.” Moreover, I show how being named “trailer trash” differently affects white and Latino/a residents, which reveals a discursive gap between this concept and “white trash.” Exploring both the conceptual overlap and distinctiveness of “white trash” and “trailer trash,” I argue, illustrates how certain unstable (or ambiguous, amorphous, placeless) identities are negotiated, contested, and materialized in specific places.
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After the land grab: Infrastructural violence and the mafia system in Indonesia's oil palm plantation zone, Anthropology Department Distinguished Lecture.
Professor Tania Murray Li, University of Toronto
4pm, Friday, February 24 in Hale 230
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"True Collaborators: Embracing Care and Immorality in the Study of Organized White Nationalism" Department Colloquium.
Professor Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, Affiliate in International Affairs, University of Colorado, Boulder
4pm, Friday, February 17 in Hale 230
"Comanche vs. Osage," painting by George Catlin.
- "Barbarian Culture: Researches into the other Other" Department Colloquium.
Dr. Severin Fowles, Associate Professor, Barnard College and Columbia University
4pm, Friday, January 27 in Hale 230Abstract: Barbarians, like primitives, are mythologized foils of civilization. But unlike primitives, barbarians have teeth and fight back. Barbarians are active (they invade; they come to you). Primitives are passive (they are colonized; you go to them). Barbarians do not represent the innocent youth of the world, but rather its rebellious adolescence. Barbarians are male. Primitives are female. This, at least, is the discursive opposition that emerged in the Western intellectual tradition during the nineteenth century.
Anthropology has always had a lot to say about “primitives,” but comparatively little to say about “barbarians.” Why? Why have the classic objects of the anthropological imagination been cold rather than hot traditions? What new conversations might emerge were we to focus on societies that do not precede the state so much as oppose the state? What if we traded in the problem of anachronism for the problem of antagonism? What if anthropology were reassembled around engagements with Others who challenge and threaten imperial projects rather than Others who suffer colonialism or submit to a relentless civilizing process? This presentation considers these questions in light of the author’s recent efforts to build an archaeological account of the Comanche history of the American Southwest.
- "Comanche Archaeology and the Theater of War" Public Lecture.
Dr. Severin Fowles, Associate Professor, Barnard College and Columbia University
7pm, Saturday, January 28 in Hale 270Abstract: The colonial history of the American Southwest looks quite a bit different today than it did only a decade ago. We used to know who the empires were: the Spanish imperial project commenced in the sixteenth century and held back the advance of the French imperial project during the eighteenth century, before both succumbed to the American imperial project in the nineteenth century. We used to know who the barbarians were as well: as the Germanic hordes were to Rome, so the bellicose equestrian tribes of the Plains were to European and Euro-American civilizations. But now these plot lines have come undone. Now we are told that, for much of the colonial era, some of the most ambitious imperial actors were Native American—and that the Comanche in particular were involved in a strange form of "reversed colonialism," startling the European colonizers by attempting to colonize them in return. In this presentation, I report on new archaeological discoveries that complicate and extend this revisionist understanding of intercultural power dynamics in the colonial Southwest.
Brief Biography:
Severin Fowles is an Associate Professor at Barnard College and Columbia University who has spent the past two decades investigating the pre-colonial, colonial, and modern histories of the American Southwest. He is the author of An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion (2013, SAR) and the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Southwest Archaeology (in press, Oxford). His current research focuses on the archaeology of Comanche imperialism in eighteenth century New Mexico.
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Running of the Buffalo: The Archaeology of the Roberts Buffalo Jump (5LR100), Northern Colorado.
Chris Johnston, Assistant State Archaeologist
Thursday, January 19, 2017 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm at the CU Museum
More information at: Indian Peaks Chapter - CAS
Sponsored by the Program for Writing & Rhetoric WRITE Lab, Anthropology, Communication, Women & Gender Studies.
AIA lecture: The Peopling of the Americas in Global Perspective
Wednesday, January 18 from 7:00-8:30pm
CU Museum of Natural History, Paleontology Hall
Archaeologist John F. Hoffecker, of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, discusses the global dispersal of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) southwards from Berengia into the Americas and explains how researchers use skeletal, genetic and archaeological data to reconstruct patterns and likely migration routes.
Admission is free. Seating is limited. Doors open at 6:15 PM. Contact: CU Museum