Department of Anthropology

2017 events

Public Lecture, "Corpse Magic for Vengeance and its Curious Demise"

April 27, 2017 - 5:00pm - 6:30pm
Location: Bryce and Izoria Gordon Gathering Hall, Room 124B Reich College of Education

Sponsored by:
College of Arts & Sciences
Department of Anthropology
Department of Philosophy & Religion
Department of English
Department of Sustainable Development

Dr. Michael T. Taussig
Class of 1993 Professor of Anthropology
Columbia University

This talk concerns instances in early ethnography recording the magic of using the corpse to kill the killer, and relates that to police shootings in the USA as well as the new scholarly field of "killology."

Michael T. Taussig, Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, is a world-renowned scholar whose prolific scholarship has pushed the boundaries of anthropological theory and ethnographic practice for nearly four decades. Taussig's writings playfully examine the compartmentalization of art and science, as to critically challenge conventions of representation in anthropology. His work travels widely across the intellectual and cultural terrain of modernity, wedding the Frankfurt School with Surrealism and new materialism, to produce highly original works on, but not limited to: the devil and commodity fetishism; colonial violence and shamanic healing; state terror and writing against terror; the magic of the state; the diary as ethnographic form; drawing and fieldwork notebooks; ecological meltdown and the bodily unconscious; and most recently, two multimedia theatrical works titled The Sun and Sea Theatre, on the sun and sea, the human and animal, and re-enchantment of the world during end-of-the-world times.

Anthropology Brown Bag Series, "Ancient Forests and Dearly Departed Ships (or, How to Summon Answers from Dead Wood)"

April 26, 2017 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 116
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
Spring 2017 Brown Bag Series

Dr. Sara Rich
Department of Art
Appalachian State University

As architectural objects, wooden ships and boats are essentially forests that have been refashioned to move across water. Demanding answers from this fundamentally shared material -- wood -- means that researchers can peer into the remote lives of ships and, if we can think of shipwrecks as dead ships, into their afterlives too. Drawing from scientific, philosophical, and artistic processes, this talk will present methods developed in the East Mediterranean and North Atlantic for interrogating the inanimate but knowledgeable entities of shipwrecks, forest landscapes, and soggy old bits of wood.

Anthropology Brown Bag Series, "The Devil's Notebooks: Tales of the Accursed Share"

April 19, 2017 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
Spring 2017 Brown Bag Series

Dr. Christina Verano Sornito

The fieldwork notebook according to Michael Taussig, can be read "as a type of modernist literature that crosses over into the science of social investigation and serve as a means of witness". (Taussig 2011) Part data, part diary, the fieldwork notebook combines the personal and subjective experience of the day to day life of fieldwork. In a similar way, the family scrapbook, a repository of the ephemera of everyday life, can also be read as a means of witness. Beyond photographs, the scrapbook includes anything from business cards, newspaper clippings, personal effects, and household lists. Sometimes these items evoke warm memories, while others evidence unanswered questions. During my fieldwork in 2011, I recovered a number of family scrapbooks and memorabilia from a rusted cabinet in my aunt's home in Santa Barbara, Iloilo. My research examined the legacy of a well known healer in the town, a legacy that reemerged as a minor town scandal and reopened the closet of dormant family drama. What might a family scrapbook bear witness to? What about the mundane life of a family might be interesting to a social scientist? In reading these scrapbooks and writing about the context of their discovery as well as their contents into my own fieldwork notebooks, I realized that I was reinscribing a new family dynamic, one that brings into question my place as an anthropologist digging about in the well of family secrets. On the other hand, as the child of immigrants to the U.S. now returning to a "home" full of ghostly effects, I began to think of the gothic as a useful trope to read a (my) family scrapbook.

Public Panel, "Mni Wiconi, Water is Life! Indigenous Resistance at Standing Rock"

April 7, 2017 - 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Location: Parkway Ballroom in the Plemmons Student Union
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

On April 7 as part of the Equity in Action Conference at Appalachian State University, three members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians will share stories and insight from their experience as water protectors in Standing Rock, North Dakota. The panelists will explore the significance of the #NoDAPL movement and discuss what comes next in the struggle for indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice.

To learn more, visit: News on the Dakota Access Pipeline: Event Info

Public Panel, "Perspectives from the Middle East: Iraq and the Levant"

April 5, 2017 - 3:15pm - 5:00pm
Location: Belk Library, Room 114
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology, Humanities Council, Department of History, Department of Government and Justice Studies, Department of Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies, Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies
Sponsored by The Department of Anthropology, The Humanities Council, The Department of History, The Department of Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies, The Department of Government and Justice Studies, and The Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies

Two scholars that specialize on the Arab Middle East, will present their research on Arab experiences from Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon in the context of contemporary questions on immigration, the war on terror, U.S. foreign policy, political economies of regime survival across the Levant, and the Arab uprisings of 2011.

Superfluous Nostalgics: Longing for an Idealized Past among Iraqis in London

Dr. Zainab Saleh
Department of Anthropology
Haverford College

Based on fieldwork with the Iraqi community in London between 2006-2016, this talk examines nostalgic subjectivity in the context of exile, ruins, and disenchantment with the present. I focus on the nostalgic longing of the London-based Iraqi exiles, in particular communists, who find themselves stranded in the present. This subjectivity is acutely haunted by memories of revolution and disillusioned by the political catastrophes of the present. My interest is to examine the haunting political past that defines the lives and memories of Iraqi communists, and to capture the loss of the hope to return, the loss of homeland, and the loss of dreams. This paper revolves around social imaginaries of revolutionary pasts, in particular the anti-colonial struggle against the British and the monarchy, and the deep disappointment that followed the rise of Saddam Hussein to power in 1979 and the US occupation of Iraq in 2003. I show that the disappointment with the present and the end of the hope of return has led to a tendency to mythologize the pre-Saddam past in which democracy, secularism, and social justice prevailed. Amid contemporary ruins and losses, an idealized past gains urgency since it provides a refuge from the present and a bleak future. My concern here is how people who lived the anti-colonial struggle remember and imagine the past, and how they inhabit the present amid the destruction of Iraq.

The Levant Six Years into the Arab Uprisings

Dr. Ziad Abu-Rish
Department of History
Ohio University

This presentation assesses the nature of political regimes and sociopolitical movements challenging the status quo in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. In particular it narrates the reverberations of the Arab uprisings in these three states, their carried trajectories, and the current balance of power between incumbent elites and opposition forces. The presentation will be comparative in nature, with an eye toward addressing the proximate causes of discontent prior to 2011, the challenges faced by opposition movements since, and the political economy of regime survival since. Key in this respect will be the current field of opposition groups and movements as well as the socio-institutional reconfiguration of existing ruling systems since.

Download a copy of the poster here (PDF, 302 KB)

Public Lecture, "Count-Mapping the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands"

April 5, 2017 - 12:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthopology Brown Bag Collequim Series

Dr. Cameron Gokee
Department of Anthropology
First Year Seminar

Drawing on anthropological research by the Undocumented Migration Project from 2010 to 2013, this talk introduces archaeological survey as a means of "counter-mapping" against the cartographic inscription and spatial exercise of power by the United States and Mexico along their border through the Sonoran Desert west of Nogales. Where national maps draw a solid line in the sand to present territorial sovereignty as an absolute, a landscape perspective on these borderlands may reveal state power to be an ongoing and often violent negotiation between natural forces, military technologies, federal agents, local communities, undocumented migrants, drug cartels, vigilantes, humanitarians, environmentalists, artists, and, now, archaeologists.

The Nile Project

April 2, 2017 (All day) - April 4, 2017 (All day)
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
http://www.news.appstate.edu/2017/03/13/the-nile-project/

Public Lecture, "Women Workers Resist!"

March 30, 2017 - 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Location: 124 Gordon Gathering Hall Reich College of Education
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Sophorn Yang, President of the Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions (CATU) and a delegate to the United Nations Conference on the Status of Women will be speaking at Appalachian State University. The presentation will be at the Gordon Gathering Hall, Room 124, in the Reich College of Education building. The event is free and open to the public.

Sophorn Yang began working in a garment factory in Cambodia when she was a teenager. By the time she was 30 years old she was president of the 10,000 member CATU. As a worker and labor organizer, she has first-hand knowledge of the global garment industry and the health, safety and human rights abuses of the "fast fashion" industry. After a 2014 garment worker's strike was brutally put down by Cambodian security forces, resulting in five worker deaths, more than 40 injuries and 23 imprisonments, she has been under a court supervision order that restricts her rights to free speech and free association in her country.

Sophorn Yang will be speaking about sweatshop labor, trends in the global garment market, the fight for better working conditions, and how consumer awareness can aid the labor struggle in the global economy.

Her work for the labor rights of women has been recognized internationally by her appointment as a delegate to the United Nations Conference on the Status of Women. She has spoken at conferences and universities in Asia, Europe and the United States.

Her remarks will be followed by a question and answer period and an interactive session that examines where and under what conditions the clothes we wear are made.

The event is sponsored by the ASU student club of United Students Against Sweatshops, the Departments of Anthropology and Sustainable Development, the Office of International Education and Development, the Office of University Sustainability, and the Office of the Quality Enhancement Plan. For more information contact Dr. Gregory Reck in the Department of Anthropology at 262-6383 or email reckgg@appstate,edu.

Public Lecture, "TAPHOS (Tombs of Aidonia Preservation, Heritage and explOration Synergasia): Place-based identity construction in the mortuary environment"

March 29, 2017 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology Brown Bag Colloquium Series

Dr. Gypsy Price
Department of Anthropology
Appalachian State University

Wednesday, March 29, 12:00pm
Anne Belk Hall, Room 336

This project explores how people negotiate their individual and communal identities in the face of social change through a diachronic investigation into place-based mortuary practices enacted at the cemetery at Aidonia, Greece, during the Late Bronze Age (LBA), a time of increasing centralization of Mycenaean sociopolitical power. Specifically, this project seeks to: 1) establish a high resolution chronology of the site using AMS and relative ceramic dating; 2) track changes in access to exchange networks using isotopic analysis of recovered bone and tooth material from the interred, neutron activation analysis of ceramic vessels, and comparative analyses of mortuary assemblages with datasets from the surrounding region; and 3) identify variation in mortuary practices through macro- and microscopic analyses of faunal and botanical ecofacts, as well as the morphology of the burial environment. This project is part of TAPHOS (Tombs of Aidonia Preservation, Heritage and explOration Synergasia), a collaboration between Dr. Kim Shelton of the Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology, University of California, Berkeley and Dr. Konstantinos Kissas of the Korinthian Ephorate of Antiquities of the Greek Ministry of Culture launched to explore the socio-cultural practices and political affiliation of the people interred at Aidonia while preserving an endangered archaeological site through systematic excavation, publication of legacy material, and public education in Greece and the United States.

Public Lecture and Panel Event, "Night in Day: The Great American Eclipse of 2017"

March 27, 2017 - 7:00pm - March 28, 2017 - 3:00pm
Sponsor: College of Arts and Sciences
https://cas.appstate.edu/news/night-day-great-american-eclipse-2017-and-its-predecessors-dr-anthony-f-aveni-professor

Public Talk, "The Evolution of Insects As Food, From Hominids to the United Nations"

March 21, 2017 - 5:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 118
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology, Department of Sustainable Development

Dr. Julie Lesnik
Wayne State University

Recently, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations published a report promoting insects as a sustainable source of animal-based nutrition that should be considered for large-scale cultivation as our global population increases. Since the 2013 FAO, small business start-ups are using pulverized crickets, or cricket "flour," as a new protein source utilized in products such as cookies, crackers, and energy bars. Cricket flour, as well as whole crickets, can also be purchased for personal use. Some products are even being marketed as part of the popular "paleo diet."

Current perceptions of insects as food here in the United States are generally of disgust, even though insects are a common and desirable food in many different cultures around the world. Common explanations for the absence of insects in our diet revolve around sendentism and agriculture, but these are phenomena that exist worldwide. From an evolutionary perspective, edible insects have been a part of the human diet for millions of years, and it is with the radiation of our genus outside of Africa and into environments at more northern latitude that we begin to see the loss of this practice. Much of our negative opinion on edible insects today can be traced back to the surprise of European explorers, unfamiliar with insects as food, encountering the behavior during their travels.

Honors in Anthropology Interest Meeting

March 8, 2017 - 6:00pm - 7:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 327
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
THINKING ABOUT GRADUATING WITH HONORS?

We will have a special interest meeting if you are interested in learning more about Honors. There is some planning involved so if you have an inkling of interest, you need to attend. This meeting will take place NEXT WEDNESDAY (March 8) at 6:00pm in Anne Belk 327.

In order to graduate with Departmental Honors, you will need to graduate with a 3.45 minimum GPA, have completed TWO honors courses, and have taken ANT 4510 while writing an Honors Thesis (which is then successfully defended in front of/passed by a committee of three faculty members).

In the meantime, please visit https://anthro.appstate.edu/academics-honors to learn more.

Public Lecture, "African Entanglements: History and Landscape in Eastern Senegal"

March 2, 2017 - 5:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 327
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
African Entanglements: History and Landscape in Eastern Senegal

Dr. Cameron Gokee
Department of Anthropology
Appalachian State University

This talk considers how small-scale societies in West Africa have become "entangled" with long-distance traders, powerful states and empires, and shifting cultural and religious traditions over the past millennium. Approaching this question through the concepts and methods of landscape archaeology, we may find that seemingly peripheral societies have long worked to actively position themselves within ever more globalized networks—an important move for overturning notions of a timeless and ever-dependent Africa.

Anthropology Brown Bag Series, "At the Foot of the Beast: Rough-Cut of an Ethnographic Film"

March 1, 2017 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
Spring 2017 Brown Bag Series

Dr. Jon H. Carter

Wednesday, March 1, 2017
12:00pm
Anne Belk Hall, Room 336

Let's begin with the proposition that ethnographic film is often confused and conflated with documentary film. What, then, separates them? This talk will explore this question, and ask how undergraduate students might learn to quickly differentiate between ethnographic and documentary cinema, based on each genre's treatment of emotion and sensation (what we call "affect"), storyboarding vs disjuncture (what we call "metonymy"), and methodology (what we call "technological estrangement"). I will screen a rough-cut of footage shot in January of this year, for an ethnographic film to be released in 2018 as the inaugural work to come out of the AppState Ethnography Lab. The screening will ask us to consider how ethnographic cinema does more than "document" a topic or object, and rather, provokes what we might call "anthropological thinking". How is that different from the documentary form? How might that approach lead to unconventional cinematic styles and techniques?

Anthropology Brown Bag Series, "Conga No Va Carajo"

February 15, 2017 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
Spring 2017
Brown Bag Series

"Conga No Va Carajo"
Christopher James

My talk concerns peasant resistance to transnational gold mines in Cajamarca, Peru. This resistance is founded on people's experiences as expressed in songs, stories, jokes, dreams and direct political actions in the face of tremendous repression. Peasant experience itself is a powerful spiritual weapon in the lucha. Through immersion into sounds and images of the struggle, I wish to give a glimpse into the peasant's lives as they confront environmental catastrophe. My work seeks to represent this resistance movement from the inside, as much as is possible. It is heart wrenching to hear a woman sing a song about how she lost her son to the police mercenaries. These moments of communion reveal the spirit of the struggle and forge the bonds which energize the resistance movement. Threatened by the death of the Earth, there is now a resurgence in consciousness of the Pacha Mama ("Earth Mother" in Quechua) which I believe to be the latest manifestation of Andean messianism, the idea that the Inca and Andean gods will return to cast out the Spanish and redeem history.

Archaeology Field School Interest Meeting

January 27, 2017 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 322
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Archaeology Field School Interest Meeting
Department of Anthropology

Come learn about Appalachian State University's 2017 archaeology field school in Tennessee. Join the PEARL project as we rediscover the millenia-old landscapes of Native North America!

For more information, contact Dr. Alice P. Wright at wrightap2@appstate.edu

Public Lecture, "Neolithic Transitions in the Native Southeast"

January 25, 2017 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Seminar 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Brown Bag Series
Spring 2017

Dr. Alice P. Wright

Archaeologists have debated the nature and pace of social, political, economic, and religious transformations associated with emergence of agriculture and village life for decades. Research in the Near East and Europe has revealed that these processes unfolded across several millennia, and that their effects continue to shape the world we live in today -- some identify the "Neolithic revolution" as the beginning of the Anthropocene. In this talk, I consider if and how the archaeological record of Southeastern North America tells a similar story about Neolithization, drawing recent findings of the Pinson Environment and Archaeology Regional Landscapes (PEARL) Project in Tennessee. Students are especially encouraged to attend if they are interested in attending the App State/PEARL field school in June.

2016 events

2016 Claassen Talk (Public Lecture), "Hopewell Blades and their Entanglements"

December 5, 2016 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 330
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. Larry Kimball

For a long time, Hopewell blades have been afforded a "special" status in the minds of archaeologists, but were they "special" in the minds of native peoples? Associated with Hopewell(ian) earthen monuments and habitation sites are small well-made blades of high quality, and often colorful lithic materials. These small tools reflect an economizing behavior of carefully selected flints, chalcedonies, and crystal quartz, have elicited diverse explanations: exchange, craft specialization, status, ritual, and ideology within the greater Hopewell phenomenon. At the same time, some studies have concluded that there is really nothing special about Hopewell blades beyond their use as multi-purpose tools. Hopewell blades from the three most significant Hopewellian sites in the Southern Appalachians -- Garden Creek, Biltmore Mound, and Icehouse Bottom are analyzed for microwear traces due to use and hafting in order to better understand what these objects meant to native peoples of the Appalachian Summit. In the process, other entanglements are recognized that connect Hopewell blades to mica cutouts, mica sources and the stars, and connections between Midwestern Hopewell ritual centers in Ohio and Indiana with both blades and ceramic vessels, and the reverse.

Free and Open to the Public

Public Lecture, "Scale/Politics: Archaeological Histories of Community in Eastern Senegal"

November 21, 2016 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology Brown Bag Series, Fall 2016

Dr. Cameron Gokee

Community has proven useful for thinking through the historical production of locality in West Africa, and yet the romanticism of this concept may risk deflecting our gaze from the ways in which people negotiate the sometimes difficult intersections between everyday life and wider spheres of political economy and cultural identity. In this paper I suggest that archaeological histories of space—from individual sites to regional landscapes—make possible a more nuanced vision of community as an uneven process that emerges through interactions among people, places, and things across these multiple scales. Specifically, I draw on recent fieldwork in eastern Senegal to map out spatial relations within and between two villages occupied over the past few centuries and variably entangled with Atlantic markets, predatory states, and the Mande and Tenda cultural traditions. In so doing, I argue that regional networks of trade, power, and kinship created both the possibility for, and limits to, the ongoing production of local communities. By complicating many taken-for-granted ideas of community, an emphasis on these sorts of scale politics may further highlight the active role of locality in shaping historical change and continuity in West Africa.

Public Lecture, "Meet Homo naledi"

November 9, 2016 - 5:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: I.G. Greer Auditorium
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. Zach Throckmorton
Lincoln Memorial University

Discovered and recovered in late 2013, studied in 2014, and announced in 2015, Homo naledi is the most recently found extinct member of our own genus. Characterized by an unprecedented combination of anatomical features, Homo naledi appears to have been well-adapted to both walking on the ground and climbing, and had both a relatively small brain yet also hands well-adapted to making tools. These tantalizing contrasts are as intriguing as how their remains were found: deep within a cave, all by themselves. In this talk, Dr. Zach Throckmorton discusses how researchers are studying Homo naledi, their functional anatomy, and the hypotheses about their lives (and deaths).

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Sponsored by:
Department of Anthropology
Department of Biology
Department of Geology
Department of Geography and Planning
College of Arts and Sciences

Download Poster (PDF, 145 KB)

Public Lecture, "Understanding 16th Century Catholicism in the New World."

November 7, 2016 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology Brown Bag Series, Fall 2016

Dr. Laura Ammon
Department of Philosophy & Religion

Dr. Cheryl Claassen
Department of Anthropology

The 16th century in Mexico was colored by prior Spanish and Catholic experiences with military and missionary expansion, the End Times, the critique of Martin Luther and the growing popularity of Virgin Mary cults. We are asking how popular religion after the Spanish arrival filled the landscape of Mexico. The cult of the saints accommodated native shrines in some cases and recast native shrines in many other cases.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Public Lecture, "Nuestro Runa Shimi: Language Preservation in an Amazonian Ecotourism Cooperative."

October 31, 2016 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology Brown Bag Series, Fall 2016

Ricki Draper
Department of Anthropology

In June and July 2016, Ricki Draper spent four weeks at the Anthropology Department's ethnographic field school working with a Kichwa women-led ecotourism cooperative in the Napo Province of Amazonian Ecuador. At the end of the field school, she returned on her own for an additional week and stayed at the cooperative as a "volunteer," helping with daily tasks at the cooperative, including working in the kitchen, caring for the children, and acting as a translator for English-speaking tourists. The ecotourism cooperative in Shiripuno creates viable space for cultural valorization and language preservation. Applying Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity to language preservation in Shiripuno, Draper examines the ways in which global and national trends in indigenous language valorization play out on the local level. In the cooperative, language preservation becomes a performative act as it produces and reproduces a script of authenticity while informing and constructing indigenous identity. To the community, the Kichwa language is Kichwa culture and ecotourism contributes to the valorization of both. In preserving the Amazonian Kichwa dialect, people in Shiripuno assert ownership over their language and demonstrate the continued relevance and significance of their distinct community identity.

Public Lecture, "Black Flag: Anarchist Anthropology and Afro-Pessimism"

October 17, 2016 - 12:00-1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 336
Department of Anthropology Brown Bag Series, Fall 2016

Dr. Jon H. Carter
Department of Anthropology

The presidential primary of 2016 has ushered in cultural, technological, and institutional transformations that changed the face of politics in the United States. Once-monolithic political parties have been fractured and now contend with a base whose power structure is more decentralized, whose sociality is emergent, and whose cultural expressions are subject to rapid change. Major parties are now forced to respond, to rethink, or to attack. At the same time, the election of 2016 has also seen the "mainstreaming" of white-nationalism and white-supremacy, discourses that had been a source of shame for most adherents in previous years but are currently touted as an antidote to "political correctness". This talk asks how writers in anarchist anthropology (reflecting on anti-globalization movements and Occupy Wall Street) and writers in Afro-pessimism (reflecting on the Black Lives Matter movement) can be put into conversation as we rethink the horizon of revolutionary politics, the path of liberation struggles, and the tactics of disruption that can awaken a society of mass-distraction.

Public Lecture, "Alagyan: Treading the Invisible Pathways of Colonial History in Panay Island"

October 10, 2016 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology Brown Bag Series, Fall 2016

Dr. Christina Verano Sornito

Along the Santa Barbara highway, on the island of Panay in the central region of the Philippines, a large tree was cut down for a road development project in 2014. Soon after, a deadly accident occurred at the very spot where the tree had once stood, reanimating stories of how this stretch of road was maari-it, or dangerous in the local dialect. This tree became another location in an invisible yet palpably experienced network of stories that traversed time and space through what local healers refer to as alagyan – which literally translates to road or path. However when a spirit medium says it there are no maps or written accounts of these networks. When one asks about that accident or that tree, it inevitably triggers other stories about other locations. Such stories have long been part of a vibrant oral tradition in the area, illuminating how the modern forces of occupation, capitalism, and climate change are well documented through stories told about nature and the indigenous spirit world. In this presentation, I combine visual experiments with ethnographic writing to chart these stories onto the times and places they are invisibly attached. Can we begin to make legible a new kind of political and social mapping of the area? Rather than recover a lost tradition or sense of indigenous authenticity ripe for nationalist or capital plunder, can we find novel ways of talking about the modern Philippines from the perspective of magic and spirit beliefs?

SPS Interest Meeting

October 6, 2016 - 5:30pm - 6:30pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 325
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Come learn about the Department of Anthropology's "Social Practice and Sustainability (SPS) program of study" by hearing from current students and SPS Faculty Advisor, Dr. Dana E. Powell.

Public Lecture, "Archaeofaunal Evidence of Subsistence Stress in the Middle Woodland Period at the Williams Spring Site, Madison County, Alabama"

October 3, 2016 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology Brown Bag Series, Fall 2016

Dr. Tom Whyte

Nearly 150,000 vertebrate and invertebrate specimens were recovered primarily from late Middle Woodland, Bell Hill phase contexts at the Williams Spring site on the Redstone Arsenal in Madison County Alabama. These include remains of at least 30 species of invertebrates and 73 species of vertebrates. Emphasis on foraging for secondary resources such as aquatic snails, evident consumption of terrestrial snails, and extreme vertebrate bone fragmentation are indicators of subsistence stress, possibly coincident with increasing human populations and competition for resources just prior to intensification of maize horticulture in the middle Tennessee River valley.

Public Lecture, "Seeing India: The Hyperreal Creation in an American Yoga Studio"

September 26, 2016 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology Brown Bag Series, Fall 2016

Rebecca Long

How does a local yoga studio create and consume India? So much of yoga's claims to legitimacy and authenticity are backed by a certain image of India, namely that of it of an ultra-spiritual, pre-colonial locale in touch with ancient wisdom. As both an anthropology student and yoga practitioner, Rebecca Long became increasingly curious about how the yoga studio is perceived as an authority not only on posture-based movement, but also on Indian culture and religion. In this talk, Long explores representations of India mobilized both at the yoga studio and while traveling in India as a yoga tourist. Long argues that the yoga studio represents India to such a degree that it becomes "India" in the eyes of many who go there. In this manner, the yoga studio becomes a local incarnation of India that is not based in the complex realities of India and becomes a simulacrum, a hyperreal space. This becomes especially problematic when considered in tandem with the Western Orientalist pattern of producing a certain knowledge of, and therefore power over, the East.

Public Lecture, ""The Crucible of Complexity: Community Organization and Social Change in Bronze Age Transylvania""

September 19, 2016 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology Brown Bag Series, Fall 2016

Colin Quinn

In the Bronze Age (2700-1300 BC), metal from Transylvania played a key role in the development of institutionalized inequality across Europe. This talk presents the results of recent research into the origins of social inequality in early mining communities in southwest Transylvania. Through a combination of spatial analyses of settlement patterns, artifact analyses, new radiocarbon dates, and reconstruction of mortuary programs, research is problematizing when, where, and how inequality first emerged in Bronze Age societies. During the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, southwest Transylvania was characterized by institutional dissonance, with mortuary practices first exaggerating, then masking, the degree of inequality experienced in daily life. By understanding how mining communities developed inequality, archaeology can provide a unique perspective on the nature of social inequality and mining in our world today.

Free and Open to the Public

Public Lecture, "Brewing Disasters: Post-Earthquake Sufferings in Rural Nepal"

September 12, 2016 - 12:00pm - 12:50pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology Brown Bag Series, Fall 2016

Dr. Gregory Reck

In July, 2016, Dinesh Paudel and Gregory Reck traveled to the community of Saipu, Nepal to collect post-earthquake narratives from local subsistence farmers. The earthquakes of April and May 2015 devastated large sectors of the country. Yet, more than a year later little reconstruction has occurred. By focusing on local narratives we wanted to gain insight into rural Nepali views of the earthquakes and the problems of reconstruction. What we found was that the aftermath of the earthquakes was complicated by the growing effects of climate change, the work of NGOs, and regional geopolitics. The result is a toxic brew that was making an already desperate situation worse.

Public Lecture, "Grassroots Public Health Activism in China: Minority Nationality Medicine," by Dr. Judith Farquhar and Dr. Lai Lili

April 15, 2016 - 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Location: Belk Library and Information Commons, Room 421
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. Judith Farquhar and Dr. Lai Lili

Download flyer for more information.

This talk is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Anthropology, Department of History, Center for Appalachian Studies, Department of Geography, and Department of Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies

Public Lecture, "The Underbelly of the Indian Boom," by Dr. Alpa Shah

April 11, 2016 - 5:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: Belk Library and Information Commons, Room 114
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Public Lecture
Free and Open to the Public

Dr. Alpa Shah

London School of Economics and Political Science

Dr. Alpa Shah is Associate Professor (Reader) in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. She read Geography at Cambridge, trained in Anthropology at the LSE, and taught anthropology at Goldsmiths until 2013 when she returned to the LSE. Dr. Shah's research and writing focuses on poor and marginalised people in India and Nepal. She explores the processes of inequality people get caught in and the various ways in which they try to subvert them. She has lived for several years as an anthropologist amidst the people she writes about.

This talk is being organized by the South Asian Studies Learning Community at Appalachian State University.

Public Lecture, "Decolonial Humanities and Geopolitics of Knowledge," by Dr. Walter D. Mignolo

March 25, 2016 - 1:00pm - 2:30pm
Location: Belk Library and Information Commons, Room 114
Sponsor: Humanities Council
Public Lecture
Free and Open to the Public

Dr. Walter D. Mignolo
Duke University

Dr. Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University and has joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies. He received his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris. Before coming to Duke in January, 1993, he taught at the Universities of Toulouse, Indiana, and Michigan. He has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and has in the past years been working on different aspects of the modern/colonial world and exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and di/pluriversalities.

This event is sponsored by the Humanities Council of Appalachian State University.

Public Lecture, "The Evolution and Meanings of Human Skin Color," Dr. Nina Jablonski

March 17, 2016 - 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Location: Belk Library and Information Commons, Room 114
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Public Lecture
Free and Open to the Public

Dr. Nina G. Jablonski
Pennsylvania State University

Dr. Nina G. Jablonski, author, anthropologist and professor, will be the special guest speaker at the 6th Annual Dean's Advisory Council Interdisciplinary Lecture, March 17, 7pm, in Belk 114. The title of her talk is "The Evolution and Meanings of Human Skin Color." The Dean's Advisory Council's Interdisciplinary Lecture series is hosted by Appalachian State University's College of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Jablonski is Evan Pugh Professor of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University. For the last 25 years, she has pursued questions in human evolution not directly answered by the fossil record, foremost among these being the evolution of human skin and skin pigmentation. From a primary interest in the evolution of skin pigmentation phenotypes, Jablonski has pursued issues surrounding the health and social implications of skin pigmentation. In addition to her scholarly articles on skin, Jablonski has written two popular books, Skin: A Natural History (2006) and Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color (2012), both published by University of California Press.

Jablonski received her B.A. in Biology at Bryn Mawr College and her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Washington.. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an elected Member of the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences of the U.S. National Research Council. She is the recipient of an Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship (2005), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2012), and an honorary doctorate from University of Stellenbosch in South Africa (2010) for her contribution to the worldwide fight against racism.

Jablonski now splits her time between basic research and educational projects. She is the lead investigator on a pilot project examining the factors that affect vitamin D status in healthy youth in the Western Cape of South Africa. She is the convener of a five-year research and education initiative, "The Effects of Race," based at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in South Africa, and – in conjunction with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is leading work on a new "genetics and genealogy" curriculum for middle- and high school students and university undergraduates in the U.S.

There will be a reception and book signing to follow the lecture, as well as copies of Dr. Jablonski's book for sale.

Public Lecture, "Undressing the Global Garment Industry: Sweatshop Labor and Global Justice"

March 17, 2016 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Plemmons Student Union, Price Lake Room
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Public Lecture
Free and Open to the Public

Morgan Carrier, National Organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS)
Noi Supalai, Labor and Union Organizer, Eagle Speed Labor Union (Thailand)

Morgan Currier, a National Organizer for the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), and Noi Supalai, an ex-garment factory worker and labor organizer from Thailand, will both make presentations about the work of the USAS, the Worker Rights Consortium, and the Thai garment labor movement to address the low pay and deplorable working conditions that characterize significant sectors of the global garment industry. A question and answer session will be held after the presentations.

Morgan Currier Bio: A graduate of the University of Washington majoring in History, Music and Law, Ms. Currier is a National Organizer for the 18 year old organization United Students Against Sweatshops. She has been an advocate and labor organizer for garment workers in Honduras and Indonesia. She worked alongside the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees at Evergreen College on labor organizing and with the Service Employees International Union in organizing health care workers in Washington and Pennsylvania. She has served on the Executive Board of the Worker Rights Consortium.

Noi Supalai Bio: A recent laborer and union organizer in the Eagle Speed garment factory in Thailand, Ms. Supalai initiated a workers' union movement resulting in an investigation by the Worker Rights Consortium into major violations in health, safety and unpaid wages. The WRC conducted an inspection of the Eagle Speed facilities and their work helped to remediate major violations of fair pay and basic health and safety working conditions. She served as president of the Eagle Labor Union from 2009-13. She currently lives with her son in Bangkok and is proprietor of a small independent tailor shop.

The USAS: Founded in 1997, the United Students Against Sweatshops has spearheaded successful campaigns for labor organization rights and fair contracts and living wage policies on campuses and communities across the United States. Utilizing student power, the organization supports workers struggling to unionize and establish living wage standards. It has fought to ensure that universities support ethical manufacturers who practice fair, safe and healthy labor practices in the name of global justice.

Public Lecture, "At the Foot of the Beast: Ethnographic Research with Gang Communities in Honduras," Dr. Jon H. Carter

February 26, 2016 - 1:00pm - 4:00pm
Location: Belk Library and Information Commons, Room 421
Sponsor: Humanities Council
Public Symposium
Free and Open to the Public

This spring the Humanities Council will feature the works of new faculty during "Warm Up with the Humanities." The event will take place February 26, 2016, from 1pm to 4pm in Belk Library room 421. Hot chocolate will be served during the event. The lead presentation will be given by Dr. Jon Carter of the Department of Anthropology.

"By featuring the research of new faculty, we will highlight the continuing importance of the humanities in developing the conceptual frameworks, contextual understandings, and interdisciplinary perspectives necessary to address the complex problems facing society today," says Dr. Nancy Love, Humanities Council Coordinator.

Two different presentation formats will be used, including traditional 30 minute lectures, and 3 minute (3MR) presentations. There will be added time for discussion between audience and presenters.

The following presentations will be given by six professors from across the College of Arts and Sciences.

"At the Foot of the Beast: Ethnographic Research with Gang Communities in Honduras"
Jon Carter, Anthropology Department
This presentation examines the everyday impacts of free-trade policy, the War on Drugs, and immigration, with particular attention to transnational street gangs in Honduras who have been the target of mass incarceration for over a decade.

"Appalachian Wine Rhetorics: Framing the Region's Vineyards"
Jessica Blackburn, English
This presentation will argue that the commodification of Appalachia vis-a-vis winemaking represents a new formation of regional identity that is derivative and inimitable, as well as local and global.

"Saving the Sea, Socially: Measuring Correlations Between Rhetorical Strategy and Common Social Behaviors of Engagement on Facebook"
Sarah Beth Hopton, English and Mitch Parry, Computer Science
This presentation explores the relationship between gesture and content on the social media platform Facebook.

"Black Genocide: American and West German Protest Movements and Changing Social Memories of Mass Violence in the 1960s and 1970s"
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies
This presentation demonstrates how the Black Panther Party, GI resistance, and the Students for a Democratic Society collaborated in modifying genocide imageries that radicalized the late 1960s protests, influencing how we confront genocidal crimes today.

"The Cruelty of Critique: Philosophy and Violence"
Rick Elmore, Philosophy Department
This presentation addresses the question of how violence might be essential to the practice of philosophy, based on Rick Elmore's current book project.

"When the Subaltern Speaks: Insights from the USA"
Cary Fraser, Government & Justice Studies
This presentation will explore the legal tradition in American life which has been used to marginalize people of color in American society, building on the work done on subaltern groups by Indian historians.

For additional information visit humanitiescouncil.appstate.edu

2015 events

Public Talk: "Between a Clown and a Divorcee: Abstention and Being in Guatemalan Elections"

November 10, 2015 - 5:00pm - 6:30pm
Location: Rankin Science West, Room 293
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Timothy J. Smith, Ph.D.

In 2011, Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, an ex-military leader accused of war-crimes in predominantly indigenous areas, ran on a campaign that offered to employ a mano dura (iron fist) approach to crime and delinquency and to clean up the government. In an ironic twist, a Guatemalan 2015 corruption scandal—in which Pérez Molina was implicated—led to his resignation. The subsequent 2015 elections saw a runoff between a comedian with no political experience (the eventual winner, backed by the military) and the ex-wife of a previous president (who divorced her husband to establish eligibility).

Media reports, however, have incorrectly identified disgust with traditional Guatemalan political parties as the reason for the comedian's win and bloggers/reporters have also overhyped abstention and nullification of ballots as a form of protest. Moreover, a focus upon national level outcomes and the privileging of urban (mainly non-indigenous) anecdotes ignores participation and voice in the majority indigenous population of Guatemala.

In this talk, Smith offers an ethnographic analysis drawn from seventeen years of fieldwork to argue for a return to community level interests—framed by lived experiences—which broad analyses too often either miss or ignore. Anthropological studies of democracy and electoral politics can offer examinations of local meanings and changing forms of power which other approaches focused on political institutions and formal regime change may overlook. His overall aim is to complicate particular philosophical explanations for abstention which tend to focus upon disaffection, alienation, and political poverty.

Public Talk: "Household Ceramic Diversity and Cultural Identity in the Late Prehistory of the Appalachian Summit"

November 4, 2015 - 11:00am - 12:00pm
Location: Anthropology Seminar Room, Anne Belk Hall
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Thomas R. Whyte, Ph.D.

Public Lecture: "Reinventing Carceral Worlds: Critical Perspectives on Neoliberal Penality in Honduras"

October 12, 2015 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Anne Belk Hall, Room 336
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. Jon H. Carter

This presentation comes from a talk Dr. Carter is giving the previous week at Cornell University as part of the conference, "Carceral Worlds and Human Rights Across the Americas," organized by the Department of Anthropology at Cornell and the Stanford Human Rights Center at the Stanford School of Law. This conference aims to pair the legal expertise in international human rights law and activism, with the extensive experience of "prison ethnographers" who have spent significant amounts of time inside of prison wards across the Americas. Dr. Carter's work in Honduras narrates the history of the current prison crisis wherein the vast majority of prison wards are designated "ungovernable" by formal authorities. His work describes the informal dynamics of prison administration where inmates themselves run prison interiors, engineering a variety of mechanisms by which to render livable the most neglected wards of confinement. The conference at Cornell University is the first meeting of a larger collaborative project between ethnographers and legal scholars that will expand the comparative studies of incarceration and penal practices across the hemisphere.

This event is free and open to the public

Public Symposium: "Postcolonial Humanities: Crossing Borders, Making Connections"

October 9, 2015 - 9:00am - 5:00pm
Location: Blue Ridge Ballroom, Plemmons Student Union
Sponsor: North Carolina Humanities Council, College of Arts and Sciences, QEP Appalachian State University

The Humanities Council of Appalachian State is hosting its Third Annual Humanities Fall Symposium on October 9, 2015 from 9:00am-5:00pm in the Blue Ridge Ballroom. This year's invited speakers include Deepika Bahri (Emory University), Deborah Barndt (York University), and C. Sade Turnispeed (Khafre Inc. and Mississippi Valley State University). This year's theme is "Postcolonial Humanities: Crossing Borders, Making Connections."

Also included in this year's symposium is a faculty panel entitled, "Why Postcolonial Humanities?" and includes Sushmita Chatterjee (Department of Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies), James Ivory (Department of English), Diane Mines (Anthropology), and William Schumann (Center for Appalachian Studies).

For more information, please visit humanitiescouncil.appstate.edu

This event is free and open to the public and is made possible with the generous support of the North Carolina Humanities Council, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the QEP at Appalachian State University, which focuses upon global learning.

Public Lecture: "Skin White as Snow: The Racial Politics of Rape While Unconscious"

October 7, 2015 - 7:00pm - 8:30pm
Location: 114 Belk Library
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Appalachian's Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies Program invites you to a presentation by Cressida Heyes, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality and Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at University of Alberta. The full title of her talk is "Skin White as Snow: The Racial Politics of Rape while Unconscious." The talk will take place in 114 Belk Library on October 7, 2015 at 7pm.

This event is free and open to the public and is co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department; the Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies Department; the English Department, the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Compliance; and the Office of Multicultural Student Development.

Please be advised that this presentation contains material that some may find upsetting.

Public Lecture: "The Subaltern, Again and Again" by Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Columbia University)

September 24, 2015 - 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: Rosen Auditorium
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
The Department of Anthropology and the South Asian Studies Learning Community is proud to present:

Dr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Columbia University

Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (theorist in postcolonial studies and one of the leading intellectuals in the world today) will speak at Appalachian State University on September 24. She is University Professor at Columbia University, and founder of Columbia's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. The author of numerous books and intellectual movements, Spivak's work is pertinent to many disciplines and interdisciplinary conversations. The title of her talk is "The Subaltern, Again and Again," and it will take place on September 24th at 4:00pm in Rosen Auditorium. This major event is free and open to the public and is spearheaded by the South Asian Studies Learning Community (SASLC) at Appalachian State University. For more information, please contact Dr. Diane P. Mines at minesdp@appstate.edu.

Public Lecture: "Border Odyssey" by Dr. Charles Thompson (Duke University)

September 15, 2015 - 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Location: 114 Belk Library
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. Charles Thompson (Duke University Center for Documentary Studies)

Dr. Charles Thompson will discuss Border Odyssey, an exploration of the U.S./Mexico border and the challenges it presents for the people of both nations. Both the book and companion website travel the entire 1,969 miles, offering resources for additional study, an interactive map that allows you to travel town by town, through photographs, text, and audio to guide you, from Boca Chica, Texas to Tijuana, California.

Lecture, "Coping with the Cascading Crisis of Our World"

March 26, 2015 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Blue Ridge Ballroom (Plemmons Student Union, 201AB)
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. Robert Jensen

Author, activist, and professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, Jensen will speak on "Coping with the Cascading Crises of Our World." At UT, Jensen teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics. He writes and lectures extensively on issues of ecology, foreign policy, politics, economics, media, white privilege, and male violence. His most recent books are Arguing for Our Lives: A User's Guide to Constructive Dialogue (City Lights, 2013); and We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out (MonkeyWrench Books/CreateSpace, 2013).

Sponsors of his visit to Appalachian include the Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership, the Sustainable Development Department, Department of Sociology, Department of Anthropology, and the College of Arts & Sciences Humanities Council.

Film Screening: Charulata (The Lonely Wife)

March 16, 2015 - 6:30pm - 9:00pm
Location: Belk Library and Commons, Room 114
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
ASU's South Asian Studies Learning Community presents Charulata (The Lonely Wife) by renowned filmmaker Satyajit Ray.=

Monday March 16, 6:30, Belk Library 114. Introduced by Dr. Sushmita Chatterjee, Assistant Professor of Gender, Women's and Sexualities Studies in Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies. Discussion to follow.

Charulata is a movie by one of India's most famed directors, Satyajit Ray. Ray is regarded worldwide as one of the finest filmmakers of all time. He received many international awards over his career including an honorary Academy Award in 1992 for Lifetime Achievement "in recognition of his rare mastery of the art of motion pictures and for his profound humanitarian outlook, which has had an indelible influence on filmmakers and audiences throughout the world" (www.satyajitray.org/about_ray/awards.htm). Akira Kurosawa, the great Japanese director wrote, "Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon" (www.satyajitray.org/about_ray/index.htm).

Charulata was released in 1964 and Ray regarded this movie as his favorite. Based on a short story by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Charulata is the story of an upper-class Bengali woman in late 19th Century India during the Bengal Renaissance.

This film viewing is funded by the QEP at ASU.

2014 events

Public Lecture and Workshop: When Shelter Becomes Exposure: Domestic Formaldehyde, Distributed Infrastructure, and Precarity in the United States

November 7, 2014 - 2:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: Belk Library and Commons, Rooms 114 and 421
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. Nick Shapiro
Goldsmiths, University of London

In January of 2010, the US federal government began auctioning off over 120,000 former emergency housing units. These trailers were originally commissioned to house those displaced by Hurricane Katrina and were commonly referred to as FEMA trailers, as they were distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Years before their resale, extensive testing revealed that the FEMA trailers harbored elevated ambient formaldehyde levels. In this talk, Dr. Shapiro tracks the quasi-legal resale of these housing units to every corner of the US. In the course of a year of ethnographic research, he found these trailers to accumulate at the poles of an unstable economy. The potentially toxic homes of study gravitated to spaces with overabundant, erupting capital--oil fields or oil spills, for instance--and spaces with capital droughts such as post-industrial small towns and Native American reservations. Both those directly extracting capital and those excluded by capital are exposed to the domestic dangers of these housing units. Dr. Shapiro will show how these trailers link capital and housing crises to the health, meaning, and materiality crises.

Dr. Nick Shapiro is a medical and environmental anthropologist. He completed his doctoral training at the University of Oxford. He is currently a post-doctoral research fellow in Goldsmiths' Department of Sociology where he studies environmental monitoring practices and technologies as a part of the European Research Council funded "Citizen Sense" project. He is the lead researcher of an indoor air quality project with the environmental monitoring non-profit Public Lab. Dr. Shapiro's research has been featured in various media outlets from NPR to The New Republic.

This talk and workshop are free and open to the public

For more information, please contact Dr. Dana Powell at powellde@appstate.edu

Spring 2014 Anthropology Senior Student Symposium

May 1, 2014 - 3:45pm - 6:00pm
Location: Linville Gorge, Room 242, Plemmons Student Union
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

(Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Timothy J. Smith)

3:45pm
"Indigenous Whaling in Barrow, Alaska: Cultural Identity and Oil"
Jorden Gragg

Indigenous whalers in the North American arctic have sustained their livelihoods in a myriad of organic and innovative ways for nearly 2,500 years. I will give a background of indigenous whaling communities in Alaska to provide a context for understanding the cultural significance of bowhead whaling in relation to community identity and how the impacts of oil extraction threaten sociocultural framings of indigenousness and practices.

4:10pm
"Capitalism as Structural Violence and the Iñupiat Whaling Identity"
Kaleb H. Shulda-Haddad

Capitalism privileges those with the most wealth and the greatest opportunities. In an of itself, capitalism produces and sustains structural inequalities that, in turn, produce social suffering and structural violence. In this paper, I will show that oil companies in the Alaska arctic operate within an economic system of capitalism that inflicts structural violence upon an indigenous community.

4:35pm
"Social Similarities and Differences between Southern Japan and the Southern United States"
Katie Horton

Much of what ASU students have learned about the social norms of Japanese national culture has come through personal experiences with Japanese exchange students from the Kansai region of southern Japan. I will explore a comparative view of the similarities and differences between Southern U.S. social norms and those from our international exchange scholar community from Southern Japan.

5:00pm
"Rethinking Globalization through Indigenous Cultural Hybridity: A Case Study of Community Tourism in Amazonian Ecuador"
Sarah Perry

In this paper, I will address the seemingly paradoxical relationship between modernization, which includes the forces of globalization and capitalism, and identity. I posit that it is not contradictory for tradition/modernity, local/global, or capitalism/culture to exist simultaneously. In fact, I argue that these dichotomies are defective and unproductive when trying to understand lived experiences.

5:25pm
"Friction in the Amazon: A Multi-Level Approach to Understanding Changing Local Economies in the Napo Region of Ecuador"
Grey Tampa

This paper will channel Anna Tsing's model of "friction," applied to a small community in the Napo province of Ecuador's Amazon Basin.

Lecture, "The Ancient Maya, El Mirador, and Teotihuacan: New Insights and Personal Journeys"

April 28, 2014 - 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: Sanford Hall, Room 404
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Sue Glenn, Maya Hieroglyphic Scholar

Recent archaeological discoveries and hieroglyphic decipherments have given new insights on intimate connections among ancient Maya communities. Sue Glenn has travelled extensively in Mexico and deep into the jungles of Guatemala in search of these connections and will share her experience and knowledge in this lecture.

Spring 2014 Anthropology Senior Student Symposium

April 24, 2014 - 3:30pm - 5:30pm
Location: Linville Gorge, Room 242, Plemmons Student Union
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

(Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Timothy J. Smith)

3:30pm
"Moving beyond a Moral Paradigm: Examining Complexities between Resource Extraction and Lived Experience in Alaska's North Slope Borough"
Megan Biddix

I will investigate energy issues as they intersect with power, agency, and control, moving beyond rigid moral paradigms in order to argue that indigenous perceptions of energy in Alaska are entangled with and borne from community views on individual rights, land and landscapes, and lived experiences.

3:55pm
"Silence in Solidarity: The Vulnerable Structures of Indigenous Ethnic Politics in Latin America"
Dan Derman

In this paper, I will explore how indigenous ethnic political movements in Latin America attempt to open the spaces and opportunities of voice and representation within larger public spheres, while governments have attempt to appease, co-opt, and discredit these counter-hegemonic movements based upon critiques of authenticity. Important theoretical contributions in my thesis come from Judith Butler's ideas on constitutive and exclusionary power of large-scale representation and political movements, as well as Edward Said's writings on power and media representation.

4:20pm
"Media and Solidarity: The Decline of the Labor Union in the United States"
John Forney

Interest and membership in labor unions in the United States have been in sharp decline over the past decade due to attacks by state and local governments (and their public constituents), more so than in Western Europe. I will argue that one major reason for this has been the consolidation and direction of U.S. mass media in converting public opinion toward individualism.

4:45pm
"From Agriculture to Oil: Keeping Colonialism Alive"
Rebecca Thompson

I will discuss how the Ogoni people have continued to suffer and lose land due to oil companies operating in Nigeria, forcing traditional farmers into a market economy, and how older colonial structures from British rule are maintained to sustain and protect resource extraction.

Spring 2014 Anthropology Senior Student Symposium

April 17, 2014 - 3:30pm - 5:35pm
Location: Linville Gorge, Room 242, Plemmons Student Union
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

(Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Timothy J. Smith)

3:30pm
"Hegemony and American Indian Boarding Schools: Resistance through Appropriation"
Caitlyn L. Brandt

In this paper, I will provide an historical analysis of the role of federal policies and education in the attempted forced assimilation of Native American communites in the United States. Using arguments from Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu, I will discuss key examples of indigenous intellectuals who have resisted these attempts and, in turn, appropriated particular knowledges (originally intended for purposes of assimilation) in building successful movements that resist and thwart continued attempts by government structures to marginalize indigenous communities.

3:55pm
"Solidarity: How Social Movements Implement Collective Identity and Social Contracts to Create Change in Civil Society"
Sydney Brown

Class, struggle, capital, and identity are concepts synonymous with social movements that seek to address social injustices in civil society. In this paper, I will discuss how the formation of collective identity is both necessary and pivotal in the fostering of successful movements. I will draw from New Social Movement Theory and Pierre Bourdieu's understanding of cultural capital to show the need for contracts, collective identity, and capital for organizing effective change.

4:20pm
"'This is Not Your Country': Race, Religion, and Identity among Lebanese Communities in West Africa"
Adam Mueller

This paper addresses how the Lebanese diaspora in West Africa has struggled as a community and how individuals have constructed new identities through the construction and use of home, as well as their use of religious institutions to provide a bedrock for a secular national identity in their attempt to resolve lingering ethnic tensions that they experience.

4:45pm
"Representations without Meaning: The Depictions of Victim and Survivor in American Media and Legislation"
Kirstie Wolf

In the U.S. media, those who experience sexual violence are labeled as "victim" or "survivor," while their own experiences and self-identification are ignored and silenced through media represenations, policy, and legislation. Through a semiotic analysis that draws from the work of Robert Lancaster, Jean Baudrillard, Albert Hirschman, Paul Rabinow, and Arjun Appadurai, I will argue that these labels have become empty representations and constitute a particular kind of hyperreality in which experiences of violence have become marginalized.

5:10pm
"The Geophysical Search for Camp Mast"
Dan Polito (Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Tom Whyte)

Environmental Humanities Symposium

April 4, 2014 - 9:00am - 7:00pm
Location: Price Lake Room, Plemmons Student Union
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Appalachian State University's Humanities Council will sponsor an all-day Environmental Humanities Symposium Friday, April 4. Symposium events begin at 9am in the Price Lake room in Plemmons Student Union. This event is free and open to the public. It is co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of Sustainability, the Anthropology Department, the Philosophy and Religion Department, and the Sustainable Development Department.

This event will be the second annual Humanities Council symposium and will feature three keynote speakers, an interdisciplinary faculty panel, a closing roundtable discussion with all keynote speakers and panelists, and a reception.

Our three keynote speakers are:

Dale Jamieson (Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies and Affiliate Professor of Law at New York University). Jamieson's publications include Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle to Stop Climate Change Failed -- and Why Our Choices Still Matter (Oxford University Press, forthcoming March 2014) and Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Jamieson's presentation is titled "Ethics in the Anthropocene."

Mel Y. Chen (Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at University of California Berkeley). Chen's publications include Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke University Press, 2012). Chen's talk is titled "Crisis Materialities."

Phaedra Pezzullo (Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture at Indiana University). Pezzullo's publications include Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution, and Environmental Justice (University of Alabama Press, 2007). Pezzullo's presentation is titled "On the Limits of Resilience: Becoming-with-Toxins and Pregnancy Loss."

In addition to our guest keynotes, four Appalachian faculty will participate on a panel featuring work in the environmental humanities at Appalachian. Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Professor of English, will present "Worlding the Climate Crisis Poem." Patricia Beaver, Professor of Appalachian Studies and Anthropology, will present "After Coal: Welsch and Appalachian Communities." Cynthia Wood, Professor of Cultural, Gender and Global Studies, will present "'But It's So Good for Our Students': A Postcolonial Critique of Study Abroad." And Dana Powell, Assistant Professor of Anthopology, will present "Unsettling Landscapes: Infrastructures of Environmental (In)Justice on the Dine Nation."

Refreshments will be provided for the breaks throughout the day, and there will be a reception in the Solarium following the event for presenters and attendees. Even though the symposium is free and open to the public, participants are asked to register to enable planning for refreshments and the reception.

To register, click on this link: http://humanitiescouncil.appstate.edu/environmental-humanities-symposium-registration

For more information, please visit http://humanitiescouncil.appstate.edu or contact Kim Q. Hall, Humanities Council Coordinator, at hallki@appstate.edu. The complete schedule of symposium events can be found on the events page on the Humanities Council's website.

Lecture, "Thinking With and Beyond the Academic/Activist Divide: Movements, Knowledges, and New Forms of Politics"

March 21, 2014 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Roan Mountain, Plemmons Student Union
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology presents:

Michal Osterweil, Ph.D.
Department of Global Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In this lecture, Dr. Osterweil will advocate for an epistemic notion of politically engaged scholarship. She will address recent debates on scholarly "engagement" that separates activist work from more critical academic endeavors. This work aims to help us rethink how anthropology (and other social sciences) can contribute to the political present, recognizing how scholarship and other forms of knowledge production are in fact already critical sites of contemporary struggle and world-making. For background reading, please see Dr. Osterweil's recent publication in Cultural Anthropology.

Michal Osterweil is a cultural anthropologist who focuses on contemporary social movements, offering ways for rethinking their materiality and effects. She is particularly interested in the intersection of knowledge production and politics, and what this suggests for the relationship between the academy and political projects. She explores the ways in which a variety of actors and mechanisms challenge the modern liberal episteme and posit alternative forms of knowing and being. Osterweil is also interested in the "problem of activism," or the ways in which activists, or an activist subjectivity, can become a conservative force, as they walk the line between theoretical potential and embodied habits. She has written about theoretical-practice and political imaginaries of the Italian Global Justice Movement and related transnational networks, in particular those affiliated with Zapatismo, as well as on the World and Regional Social Forums. Her current project is a collaborative investigation with members of a U.S.-wide movement network using the phrase "transformative organizing and deep change" to describe a holistic form of activism that acknowledges the limitations and shortcomings of previous practices and frameworks of change. In addition to her research, Osterweil has worked to co-create projects and spaces that seek to produce collective knowledge for change inside and outside the university. She was one of the core members of the Social Movement Working Group at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is also involved in activist publishing and theoretical endeavors. For examples of the latter, see Turbulence: Ideas for Movement, for which she was a founder, contributor, and a member of the editorial collective.

This event is free and open to the public
For more information, please contact Dr. Dana Powell at powellde@appstate.edu

2013 events

Lecture: "Mass Graves in Iraq: A Brief Overview with Case Studies"

November 14, 2013 - 6:00pm - 7:00pm
Location: Sanford Hall 404
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

David Hines
University of Florida

Decades of wars, repressions, and uprisings have left Iraq with a mass graves problem of considerable scope and diversity. The graves are found throughout the country; they are small and large, in urban and in rural settings, isolated and in large complexes, clandestine and intentionally public. The human remains in the graves are diverse, as well: they include soldiers and civilians, men and women, adults and children, and all religious and ethnic groups.

This lecture addresses the history, typology, and recovery of Iraq's mass graves, as well as general mass graves methodology. The process is illustrated with real examples and problems from mass graves work in Iraq, both in the field and mortuary, from finding grave sites, excavating them, and recovering the human remains and other evidence, to analyzing the evidence and identifying patterns within the data collected.

Advisory: this lecture includes photographs of skeletonized human remains, including juveniles, and photographs of skeletal trauma.

David Hines is a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida. He has worked extensively on mass graves and related issues in Iraq, from 2005 through 2007 as an osteoarchaeologist for the Regime Crimes Liaison Office Mass Graves Investigation Team (RCLO/MGIT), and since 2010 as forensic anthropology trainer for the Iraq offices of the International Commission on Missing Persons. In the United States, he has worked as a graduate assistant at the University of Florida's C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, as a medicolegal death investigator for the Medical Examiner's Office in Jacksonville, Florida, and as owner-operator of a physical anthropology consulting company. He lives in Baghdad, Erbil, and Greensboro.

This event is free and open to the public
For more information, please contact the Department of Anthropology at perryal@appstate.edu or at 828-262-2295

Lecture: "Becoming Melungeon: Making an Ethnic Identity in the Appalachian South"

November 8, 2013 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Location: Belk Library and Commons, Room 421
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Public Lecture

Melissa Schrift, Ph.D.
East Tennessee State University

Appalachian legend describes a mysterious, multiethnic population of exotic, dark-skinned rogues called Melungeons who rejected the outside world and lived in the remote, rugged mountains in the farthest corner of northeast Tennessee. The allegedly unknown origins of these Melungeons are part of what drove this legend and generated myriad exotic origin theories. Though nobody self-identified as Melungeon before the 1960s, by the 1990s "Melungeonness" had become a full-fledged cultural phenomenon, resulting in a zealous online community and annual meetings where self-identified Melungeons gathered to discuss shared genealogy and history. Although today Melungeons are commonly identified as the descendants of underclass whites, freed African Americans, and Native Americans, this ethnic identity is still largely a social construction based on local tradition, myth, and media.

She is a graduate of ASU. You can read more about her career here

This event is free and open to the public

Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, Center for Appalachian Studies, and the Appalachian Collection of Belk Library

For more information, please contact the Department of Anthropology at perryal@appstate.edu or at 828-262-2295

Lecture: "The Living and the Dead around the Palace at Pylos, Greece: A Symbiotic Relationship"

October 29, 2013 - 5:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: Sanford Hall 404
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Joanne M.A. Murphy, Ph.D.
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

This paper presents the results of an ongoing project that constitutes a re-examination of the artifacts and excavation notebooks of Blegen's excavation of the tombs around the Palace of Nestor, Pylos, in southwestern Greece. In this paper, I show through an examination of the artifacts in the tombs that there were significant changes in mortuary activity overtime. These changes in the mortuary sphere, combined with the refocusing of the economic expenditure at the palace, suggest that the ways in which the Pylians incorporated their ancestors into their power strategies altered over time.

Speaker Bio

Joanne M. A. Murphy is an assistant professor of Classical Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her work focuses on the archaeology of ritual and death in Bronze Age Greece. Her work has addressed these issues in both the early small scale communities of Crete and the later states on the mainland.

Her most recent project is a pedestrian survey on the Greek island on Kea where she and her team are testing the value of survey as an archaeological method. Her BA and first MA were from University College Dublin, Ireland and her second MA and PhD are from the University of Cincinnati.

Public Lecture: Oil Legacies and Sustainable Futures on Mexico's Gulf Coast

October 23, 2013 - 5:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: I.G. Greer Auditorium
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Lisa Breglia, Ph.D.
Global Affairs, George Mason University

Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula is well known for a rich legacy of great cultural achievement of ancient Maya civilization found in a contemporary landscape replete with archaeological ruins. But the legacy that current residents of the Gulf coast of the southern state of Campeche face with consternation rather than celebration is the damage to the marine and coastal environment wrought by three decades of intensive offshore oil exploitation. Now confronted with irrecoverable declines in capture in Gulf fisheries and the loss of the hard-won local revenues that oil production brought to the local level, coastal fishing communities of Campeche's Laguna de Términos region are turning to nature-based tourism as a last resort for sustainable development. In order to be successful, they must compete with the phenomenal success of the fun-and-sun beach tourism of the Maya Riviera as well as cultural heritage tourism in the Peninsula's internationally famous archaeological zones. But perhaps the bigger challenge is the expansion of public and private sector on- and offshore oil and gas drilling. How can the seemingly incompatible projects of fossil fuel exploitation and nature-based tourism in the Laguna de Términos provide a sustainable future for Campeche's coastal residents?

About the Speaker
Lisa Breglia's work focuses on natural and cultural resources, ranging from archaeological heritage to energy, and her research interests extend from Mexico, to Colombia, and Cuba. She is the author of Monumental Ambivalence: the Politics of Heritage (University of Texas Press, 2006), an ethnography which illustrates and analyzes the competing claims to own and benefit from Maya archaeological sites in the Yucatán Peninsula. Her book, Living with Oil: Promises Peaks and Declines on Mexico's Gulf Coast (University of Texas Press, 2013) examines how Mexico's oil industry affects not only lives and livelihoods of fisherfolk in Campeche's Laguna de Términos, but also how thirty years of offshore oil extraction shapes US/Mexico relations as well as hemispheric energy policy. Breglia is currently the director of both the Global Affairs Program and the Global Interdisciplinary Programs at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She lives in Washington, DC where she volunteers for the Stop the Drill campaign with Oceana, a global oceans conservation organization.

A small reception will take place after the talk and copies of Living with Oil: Promises Peaks and Declines on Mexico's Gulf Coast (University of Texas Press, 2013) will be available for purchase and signing by Dr. Breglia.

Sponsored by
Department of Anthropology
Department of Geography & Planning
Department of Sustainable Development
College of Arts & Sciences
Office of International Education and Development

Lecture: "Chinese Medicine in Action: Postcolonial Encounters in a Chinese Medicine Hospital"

March 29, 2013 - 11:00am - 12:30pm
Location: Three Top Room (Plemmons New Wing)
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology

Eric Karchmer

Since the early 20th century, there has been strong opposition to Chinese medicine within Chinese society. Detractors have attacked Chinese medicine as unscientific and a hindrance to the development of the nation. Doctors of Chinese medicine have responded to these criticisms by developing a "postcolonial" form of medicine, adjusting their practice to the standards of biomedicine. The key to this adaptation is the methodology of "pattern recognition and treatment determination bianzheng lunzhi 辨证论治," celebrated as one of the timeless principles of Chinese medicine, but which turns out to be a mid 20th century invention. Through the close examination of a typical medical case at a prominent Chinese medicine hospital, I show that bianzheng lunzhi plays two contradictory roles in everyday clinical practice. On the one hand, it marks the uniqueness of Chinese medicine, distinguishing it from biomedicine. On the other hand, it provides a technology for integrating these two disparate medical practices. By simultaneously encompassing these dual processes of purification and hybridization, bianzheng lunzhi has facilitated what I call the "postcolonial transformation" of Chinese medicine.

For more information, please call 828-262-2295 or email perryal@appstate.edu

Lecture, "Two Seasons of 'Peaceful' Excavations at Ft. Anderson"

March 27, 2013 - 6:30pm - 8:00pm
Location: Sanford Hall 406
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Tom Beaman, RPA
Wake Tech Community College and Peace College

His presentation will also include a discussion of working as a professional archaeologist and information will be provided about the field school offered this summer through Peace College.

Film screening and discussion with Indian filmmaker Pankaj Rishi Jumar: Punches n Ponytails

March 26, 2013 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Three Top Room (Plemmons New Wing)
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
The Department of Anthropology and the Office of International Education and Development present

Indian Filmmaker, Pankaj Rishi Jumar

Graduating from Pune's Film and Television Institute in 1992, and specialising in Film Editing, Pankaj was assistant editor for Sekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen. After editing documentaries and TV serials, he made his first film, KUMAR TALKIES. Subsequently, Pankaj has become a one man crew producing, directing, shooting and editing his own films. (Pather Chujaeri, The Vote, Gharat, 3 Men and a Bulb, Punches n Ponytails, and Seeds of Dissent). His films have been screened at festivals all over the world. He has won grants from Hubert Bals, IFA, Jan Vrijman, Gotoberg, Banff, Majlis and Sarai. Pankaj was awarded an Asia Society fellowship at Harvard Asia Center.

Punches n Ponytails, a film on women boxing in India. Two young women pursuing a dream of becoming professional boxers against all odds in their conservative, patriarchal Indian town. http://kumartalkies.blogspot.com/2008/08/punches-n-ponytails-film-on-women.html

For more information, please contact the Department of Anthropology at 828-262-2295 or send inquiries to perryal@appstate.edu

Lecture: "Transforming Information into Knowledge: Drugs, Violence and Healing in Southwest China"

March 26, 2013 - 5:00pm - 6:30pm
Location: Three Top Room (Plemmons New Wing)
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology

Wenyi Zhang
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Since the 1990s, the Kachin in Southwest China have undergone a crisis of HIV/AIDS and drug use. Various governmental and international prevention programs elicit no behavioral response that might hold back the increasing rates of drug use, whereas villagers work with local government officials to design and carry out locally sensitive and effective rehabilitation programs for drug users. As a result, the crisis in the early 2000s had been largely controlled by 2011 in my fieldwork base. Based on my 29 months of fieldwork, I explore why government and international projects were ineffective while the local projects worked. In the local rehabilitation programs, individual rehabilitation is guaranteed by governmental violence, and violence is moderated by drug users' new identity making. I analyze how such collaboration between violence and rehabilitation transforms public health information, available to everybody, into knowledge vital and urgent for certain individuals to act on. I also propose a perspective for integrating the psycho-somatic dynamics of individual healing/rehabilitation and the socio-political processes of drug use in Southwest China.

For more information,please call 828-262-2295 or email perryal@appstate.edu

Film screening and discussion with Indian filmmaker Pankaj Rishi Jumar: 3 Men and a Bulb

March 25, 2013 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Three Top Room (Plemmons New Wing)
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Indian Filmmaker, Pankaj Rishi Jumar

Graduating from Pune's Film and Television Institute in 1992, and specialising in Film Editing, Pankaj was assistant editor for Sekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen. After editing documentaries and TV serials, he made his first film, KUMAR TALKIES. Subsequently, Pankaj has become a one man crew producing, directing, shooting and editing his own films. (Pather Chujaeri, The Vote, Gharat, 3 Men and a Bulb, Punches n Ponytails, and Seeds of Dissent). His films have been screened at festivals all over the world. He has won grants from Hubert Bals, IFA, Jan Vrijman, Gotoberg, Banff, Majlis and Sarai. Pankaj was awarded an Asia Society fellowship at Harvard Asia Center.

3 Men and a Bulb. A story about earning a good living, and a story about all the larger forces at work that don't allow one to do so, the film focuses on 3 men in the Himalayan foothills who earn a meager livelihood from their watermill. http://kumartalkies.blogspot.com/2006/07/3-men-and-bulb-dv-200674mts-synopsis-3.html

For more information, please contact the Department of Anthropology at 828-262-2295 or send inquiries to perryal@appstate.edu

2012 events

Lecture, "Holocene Diet and Seasonality at Niah Cave (Sarawak, East Malaysia): New Insights From Light Stable Isotopes"

November 2, 2012 - 2:00pm - 4:00pm
Location: 421 Belk LIbrary and Information Commons
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

John Krigbaum, Ph.D.
University of Florida

Dr. Krigbaum's presentation reviews light stable isotope data derived from human tooth enamel recovered from Niah Cave in northern Borneo. Published stable carbon and oxygen isotope data from bulk samples of tooth enamel will be compared to serially-sampled tooth enamel data to infer patterns of seasonality and diet.

This presentation will provide a great opportunity for students and the general public to witness interdisciplinary research in anthropology, chemistry, museum studies and geological sciences.

He has used stable isotope analysis to address a variety of paleontological and archaeological problems - from his work on the Paleocene-Eocene transition in fauna from Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, to the reconstruction of dietary adaptations in prehistoric human populations in prehistoric Asia.

This talk is sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Geology.

Archaeology Talks

October 24, 2012 - 11:00am - 12:00pm
Location: Sanford 401
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Archaeology Talks

11:00-11:30
Dr. Tom Whyte
"Middle Woodland Period Feasting at the Garden Creek and Biltmore Mounds in the Appalachian Summit"

11:30-12:00
Dr. Cheryl Claassen
"The Hunt God Rite: An Archaic Rosetta Stone" 

Lecture, "'Oxygen for the World': Social Change, Maya Identity, and Human Environmental Rights in a Mesoamerican Community"

April 24, 2012 - 5:00pm - 6:30pm
Location: Belk Library, Room 421
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology, Department of Philosophy and Religion, and the Goodnight Family Sustainable Development Program
Dr. C. Mathews Samson
Davidson College

This talk turns a humanistic eye toward the issue of securing human environmental rights through the work of the Chico Mendes Reforestation Project in the Guatemalan highland community of Cantel. Participant observation and interview data are used to examine the impact of Maya cultural identity and religious practices on the creation and perpetuation of a project directed toward preserving water and forestry resources in a situation where population increase and larger development interests pose potential threats to these resources over time.

The discourse of the project’s founder demonstrates how efforts to promote sustainable resource use at the local scale correlate with struggles over cultural rights in the political and social arena beyond the local context. Likewise, with a focus on planting trees that will “generate oxygen for the world,” the project shows how human rights agendas can be broadened to take into account the importance of subsistence issues when human-environment relations are considered at different scales of analysis.

Research Symposium, "Indian Archaeology, Bioarchaeology, and Prehistory"

April 2, 2012 - 5:00pm - 6:30pm
Location: Belk Library, Room 421
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

South Asia sits at an important crossroad in the evolutionary journey of humans. Since the first exodus of anatomically modern Homo sapiens from Africa, human populations have successfully colonized this geographically, climatically, and culturally diverse region. The rich archaeological record from the Holocene period in particular highlights the challenges human populations faced living in this increasingly semi-arid environment, with its increasingly unpredictable monsoon climate and sharply demarcated ecozones. Research on the human skeletal populations from South Asia in particular, has demonstrated the deeply bio-cultural nature of adaptations that developed in response to these challenges. Despite its crucial role in understanding human evolution, Old World migrations, and human-environmental interaction, South Asia has been hugely neglected in archaeology, paleoanthropology, and bioarchaeology.

The Department of Anthropology is especially pleased and honored to announce two visiting scholars from India, who will speak on the current state of knowledge about South Asian prehistory and bioarchaeology and the challenges facing research efforts in this important area.

5:00-5:30pm
"Demography of Ancient South Asian Populations"
Dr. S.R. Walimbe, retired professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of Pune, India

Human skeletal remains offer a fruitful subject of inquiry by providing valuable information on age at death, sex of the deceased, cause of mortality, bone injuries and certain diseases present in the population. The Indian subcontinent provides an excellent array of human skeletal evidence belonging to a rich spectrum of cultural phases, including hunting-gathering Mesolithic, urbanized Harappan, early agro-pastoral Neolithic-Chalcolithic, and Iron-Age Megalithic builders. The aim of this presentation is to give a lucid picture of the developments and recent research trends adopted in Indian anthropology for the benefit of scientists as well as laymen.

Dr. S.R. Walimbe is a pioneer in pursuing a bio-cultural approach to understanding the nature of bodily adaptations of extinct Indian populations. A scholar of international reputation, Prof. Walimbe has studied more than 50 skeletal populations, and is the leader of the only active research group engaged in human skeletal research in India. He is also the promoter of 'ancient DNA' research directions in India.

5:30-6pm
"Anthropological investigations on the Early Historic Human Skeletal Series of Kumhar Tekari, India"
Dr. Veena Mushrif-Tripathy, Assistant Professor, Department of Archaeology, Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, Pune, India

While the Indian sub-continent provides excellent skeletal collections of Protohistoric human populations, basic documentation is lacking for many of these 'artifacts'. The skeletal series from Kumhar Tekri in Madhya Pradesh was excavated in 1930s’. This talk describes the salient features of this skeletal collection but more importantly, this talk uses the present research to underline the need for restudy of the numerous unattended skeletal collections in India using current research approaches. This talk also highlights the logistic problems, temporal, financial, and human capital requirements for developing a long term research plan for bioarchaeology in India.

Prof. Veena Mushrif-Tripathy has wide-ranging research experience in the excavation, treatment and studies on archaeological skeletal series. She has participated in several Government and University research projects. She has four monographs and several articles to her credit. Dr. Veena is heading the anthropology laboratory of Deccan College, the only centre in India solely devoted for human skeletal research.

These lectures are free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Department of Anthropology at robbinsgm@appstate.edu 

Lecture, "Grave Politics: Memory and the Work of Post-Conflict Repair"

February 28, 2012 - 5:00pm - 6:30pm
Location: Belk Library, Room 421
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. Sarah Wagner
Department of Anthropology
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

The lecture will examine how advances in forensic science have affected the work of social reconstruction in post-conflict societies. Dr. Wagner will draw from the example of Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which innovations in DNA testing has helped recover and identify victims of the July 1995 genocide, as well as the US government's efforts at the "fullest possible accounting" of service members missing or killed in action during the wars of the twentieth century.

Dr. Sarah Wagner received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 2006 and also holds an MALD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (2002). Part political anthropology and science and technology studies, her recent research has focused on the nexus of genetic technology, politics, and society in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her book, To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing (University of California Press, October 2008), examines the DNA-based forensic system developed to identify the over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys killed in the July 1995 genocide at the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica. Based on extensive ethnographic research conducted from 2003 to 2007, the study analyzes the technology’s sociopolitical import for postwar Bosnia—from surviving families to nationalist political leaders and international representatives—as well as its application beyond the Balkans. In continuing research in eastern Bosnia, she is working on a collaborative project on the aftermath of the Srebrenica genocide that looks at prevailing discourses of nation-building and post-conflict social reconstruction.

Her interest in the application of genetic technology in postmortem identification systems has recently expanded to include the United States and the recovery efforts for missing soldiers. This research addresses how DNA testing used to identify remains of US soldiers killed in the Vietnam War has affected modes of national commemoration, as well as expectations of surviving families and fellow soldiers about the recovery and identification processes.

Research Lecture, "Technologies of Sovereignty: The Political Ecology of Energy Development on the Navajo Nation"

February 21, 2012 - 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Location: Sanford Hall, Room 405
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Technologies of Sovereignty: The Political Ecology of Energy Development on the Navajo Nation

Dana E. Powell, Ph.D.

This presentation addresses the socio-cultural politics of energy technologies and environmentalism on the Navajo Nation. Using a concept I call landscapes of power, this talk offers an ethnographic perspective on the Desert Rock Energy Project, a controversial coal-fired power plant proposed for Navajo land. Eight years after its initial proposal, construction of the power plant has still not begun. However, Desert Rock has emerged as a fulcrum for ongoing debates concerning sustainability, environmental justice, expert knowledge, contending cosmologies, and indigenous identity. Unlike some discourses on sustainability, which ignore political identity, the Desert Rock story reveals that debates about the environment and infrastructure on the Navajo Nation are also inevitably debates about tribal sovereignty. Drawing upon my ethnographic research from 2007-2008, I show how the struggle over Desert Rock challenges our notions about what the environment is and who claims to act in its name.

A Conversation with Mary Wachacha

February 8, 2012 - 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Location: Edwin Duncan Hall, Room 315
Sponsor: University Forum Committee, the Department of Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Studies and Appalachian Studies Programs.
Mary Wachacha, Lead Consultant for the Indian Health Service (IHS)

Cherokee, North Carolina is the location of the Qualla Boundary (Cherokee Indian Reservation) and home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Mary Wachacha is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band and has served in various capacities during her 40 year career with the Cherokees and other Native Americans. Mary will discuss the unique modern history of the Cherokee Indians, their lifestyles, their culture, their Casino, and their health care and the relationship between western medical ethics and Native American/Cherokee ethics.

Mary is a former Peace Corps volunteer and spent 3 years in Tunisia, Northern Africa; a Teacher for the Bureau of Indian Affairs for 15 years; and the Lead Consultant for the Indian Health Service at IHS Headquarters for 24 years. She has worked extensively with Indian Tribes who use IHS services—traveling to Indian hospitals and clinics to provide onsite in-service training on various health topics.

Research Lecture, "Ecofriendly Roses?: Struggling to Define, Achieve, & Maintain Sustainable Development in Naivasha, Kenya"

February 6, 2012 - 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Location: Rankin Science West, Room 023
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Ecofriendly Roses?: Struggling to Define, Achieve, & Maintain Sustainable Development in Naivasha, Kenya

Megan A. Styles, Ph.D.
University of Washington

A Kenyan woman in a water-stained smock carefully packs a long stem rose between layers of tissue paper. Less than twenty-four hours later, a British woman chooses the same rose from a display in a London supermarket. Cut flowers are currently Kenya’s second largest earner of foreign exchange, and the floriculture industry provides a critical form of employment for an estimated 50,000 wage laborers, 65% of whom are women. However, flower farming also generates controversy amidst allegations of poor working conditions and unintended ecological side effects. The majority of Kenyan roses are grown along the shores of Lake Naivasha, a critical freshwater body north of Nairobi, and the social and environmental effects of floriculture in this place are the subject of heated debate in Kenya and abroad. This talk investigates the ways that people living and working in Naivasha struggle to define, achieve, and maintain “sustainable development.” Are “ecofriendly” roses possible?

2011 events

Into the Christmas Tree Fields: An Evening Featuring Two Documentary Films on Migrant Farmworkers

November 10, 2011 - 7:30pm - 10:00pm
Location: Table Rock Room - Plemmons Student Union
Sponsor: Farmworkers Health Program

This event will consist of a panel discussion featuring community experts. The panel consists of Dr. Timothy J. Smith, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Allison Lipscomb, MPH, Director, Farmworker Health Program, and Cecelia Hinek, 2011 Into the Fields Intern, Student Action with Farmworkers. The event will feature a documentary created by a member of the Farmworker Health Program which focuses directly on the farmworker community within Watauga County.

Lecture: It Has to Be Climate Sustainability: Let the Debate Begin!

February 24, 2011 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Price Lake Room, Plemmons Student Union
Sponsor: Departments of Anthropology, Geography and Planning, and Technology, the Appalachian Studies, Global Studies, and Sustainable Development programs, and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Internationally acclaimed writer and activist, Uchita de Zoysa from Sri Lanka, will be speaking at Appalachian State University on Thursday, February 24 at 7 pm in the Price Lake Room in the ASU Student Center.

De Zoysa has spent the past several decades as a leader in mobilizing civil society for public-private partnerships in developing strategies and policies for dealing with climate sustainability. He has served as a strong voice from the Third World, simultaneously advocating for greater global social and economic justice and for urgent action to address the causes of global climate change.

His recent book, It Has to Be Climate Sustainability, was unveiled at the December 2009 United Nations Summit in Copenhagen. Bas de Leeuw, former head of Sustainable Consumption at UNEP, Paris, writes that when it comes to climate sustainability De Zoysa argues that “…there is no such things as ‘who is doing what’, but that we are all in it together and only can get out of it together.” Flora Ijjas, a noted sustainable development researcher from Hungary, discussing de Zoysa’s latest book, states that “Most of the books written on sustainability or climate change are dealing with the outer effects of the processes… Uchita de Zoysa tries it in a different way. He goes beyond and examines the inner forces…that are driving humanity and individuals.”

De Zoysa is also Chairman/CEO of Global Sustainability Solutions and Moderator of the Global People’s Sustainability Dialogue. Among the many global conferences to which he has been an invited participant are the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. He is also a member of the National Advisory Committee on Climate Change in Sri Lanka. De Zoysa is in the United States to attend a United Nations conference on sustainability in New York and his appearance at ASU is his only lecture scheduled during his visit.

For more information, visit http://www.news.appstate.edu/2011/02/11/uchita-de-zoysa-speaks-feb-24-at-appalachian/

2010 events

Lecture, "Caste, Social Justice, and Religion: Positive Discrimination Policy in India"

November 15, 2010 - 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Location: Room 421, Belk Library and Commons
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. S. Sumathi
Fulbright Scholar

India has adopted a policy of “Positive Discrimination” in order to correct past social, economic, and political injustices. This policy favors those communities which were discriminated against historically, including the “Dalit,” also referred to as “untouchables.” Members of the Dali caste that have converted to Christianity are being denied the opportunities available through “Positive Discrimination” in secular India. Dr. Sumathi asks the question: Has their conversion to Christianity really changed the social position of the Dalit and given them any upward mobility in the caste hierarchy?

Dr. S. Sumathi is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Madras, Chennai, India. She has been awarded a Fulbright- Nehru Visiting Lecturer Fellowship for the period of 2010-2011. Dr. Sumathi is currently a Visiting Scholar at Appalachian State University. Her primary research work in India focuses broadly on the topic of development issues as they relate to subjugated castes within Indian social structure. She is an accomplished ethnographic researcher and the producer of many short visual documentaries.
Indian Food will be served!

Lecture, "Agency in the Making: Adult Immigrants' Accounts of Language Learning and Use in Multilingual Contexts"

November 8, 2010 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Room 401, Sanford Hall
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. Elizabeth R. Miller
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Though human agency is a widely used concept across the humanities and social sciences, it remains a highly contested phenomenon. Not only is it defined differently (e.g. as a synonym for free will, or resistance, or intentionality, among many others), there is no consensus on how one identifies it “in action.” Following Ahearn (2001), who championed the importance of looking closely at language and linguistic form when exploring agency, my presentation will examine how agency is encoded in particular linguistic constructions produced in interview conversations with 18 adult immigrant small business owners in the U.S. I focus primarily on how these individuals constitute themselves as (non)agents with respect to the actions they take to learn and use English as well as in their informal learning of non-English languages in their places of business. I also examine the evaluative stances these interviewees construct toward these agentive acts and their outcomes. In taking such an analytic perspective, I do not make any claims to causality (i.e. that producing grammatical encodings of agency creates agency), but rather treat these individuals’ accounts as displays of their implicit understandings of who can act, who is responsible to act, and how these actions are valued. At the same time I explore how such typically unconscious understandings of agency are socioculturally mediated rather than individually derived or ontological givens of humans. More particularly, I explore Blommaert’s (2005) notion of how the “agency of spaces” can constrain and/or enable particular linguistic acts in contemporary multilingual contexts created through modern mass migrations. Ultimately, I argue that human agency, and in this case language learner agency, must be understood as inherently unstable, discursively constituted, and socioculturally and ideologically mediated.

Dr. Miller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interests focus on issues surrounding the learning of English as a second/additional language, particularly issues regarding identity construction in and through language learning, power dynamics, and language ideologies. She investigates how these social dynamics are constituted in/as interaction, using fine-grained discourse analysis. Her current research examines the construction of language ideologies in interactions involving minority language speakers, how learner agency is constituted in discourse, and qualitative research methodologies, particularly the co-constructed, mediated nature of interview data.

Lecture, "John White and the Invention of Anthropology: Landscape, Ethnography, and Situating the Other in Roanoke Island"

November 1, 2010 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Room 224 I.G. Greer
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. Michael Harkin
University of Wyoming

In this lecture, Dr. Harkin will argue for the reconsideration of the texts and especially visual images of coastal Algonquians produced by John White in collaboration with Theodor De Bry in the 1580s as the moment of creation of a modern anthropological discourse. Three elements are copresent that would define the professional anthropology of a later era: ethnographic empiricism, analytic holism, and comparativism. As would the nineteenth-century version of evolutionary anthropology, this discursive structure was explicitly linked with colonialism. In contrast to alternate models of the era, which relied on metaphoric representations of non-Europeans, White and De Bry employed metonymic tropes, opening possibilities of both coexistence and colonial possession.

Dr. Harkin is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. He grew up in California and North Carolina, and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in English and International Studies. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1988. He has conducted field research with the Heiltsuk and Nuu-chah-nulth of British Columbia, and in France, North Carolina, and Wyoming. He wrote The Heiltsuks: Dialogues of Culture and History on the Northwest Coast (University of Nebraska Press, 1998), has edited three books and two special issues, and authored dozens of articles and chapters. He serves as Editor of Ethnohistory and on the editorial board of UNESCO's Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. He has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Canadian Embassy, and the Wyoming Arts Council. In addition to the University of Wyoming, he has taught at Montana State, Emory, and Shanghai University.

Lecture, "Making Tourette Syndrome: Culture, Agency, and the Construction of Illness"

October 25, 2010 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Room 224 I.G. Greer
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. Andrew Buckser
Purdue University

Dr. Andrew Buckser is Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University. He is a cultural anthropologist who studies the effects of social change on religious systems and on understandings of illness. He has conducted much of his research in Denmark, where he has done fieldwork with a variety of religious groups. His first study, in the early 1990s, explored the development of several Protestant sects in rural Jutland. Subsequently he worked with members of the Jewish community in Copenhagen, investigating changes in the Jewish experience there over the course of the twentieth century. His recent work has turned to Indiana, where he conducts fieldwork and interviews among people with the neurological disorder known as Tourette Syndrome. In each of these settings, he has asked how changing cultural systems shape notions of self, and conversely, how individual struggles for self-identity influence the development of larger cultural models. This work has been published in a variety of journals in anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and ethnic studies. Dr. Buckser has also published three books on his research: Communities of Faith: Sectarianism, Identity, and Social Change on a Danish Island (Berghahn 1996); After the Rescue: Jewish Identity and Community in Contemporary Denmark (Palgrave Macmillan 2003); and The Anthropology of Religious Conversion (Rowman and Littlefield 2003), edited with Stephen Glazier.

Symposium, "Appalachia and Wales: Coal and After Coal"

October 14, 2010 - 7:00pm
Location: Plemmons Student Union
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

What happened when Welsh coal mines closed during the 1980’s?

How did communities make the transition from an economy dependent on fossil fuels?

What does the Welsh story mean for creating sustainable Appalachian communities?

During the event, a range of scholars, artists, and activists will provide an interdisciplinary view of how issues relating to how coal, climate change, economy, and technology have shaped the coalfields of South Wales and Appalachia.

Featured speakers include Jeff Biggers, Helen Lewis, Ron Lewis, Hywel Francis, MP, William Schumann, Randy Wilson, Mair Francis, and Amanda Starbuck.

Rare film clips from Helen Lewis and John Gaventa’s visits to the Welsh coalfields in the 1970’s will be shown, as well as the new Appalshop documentary The Electricity Fairy.

Appalachia and Wales: Coal and After Coal is presented by the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University with major financial support from the University Forum Committee, and the Office of Academic Affairs. This project is made possible by a grant from the North Carolina Humanities Council, a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Co-sponsors include: departments of Anthropology, Communication, Government and Justice Studies, History, Philosophy and Religion, Sociology, Sustainable Development, International Programs, the Institute for Energy, Economics, and Environment, and University Documentary Film Services.

The Center for Appalachian Studies is a unit within Appalachian’s University College. University College consists of the university’s integrated general education curriculum, academic support services, residential learning communities, interdisciplinary degree programs and co-curricular programming—all designed to support the work of students both inside and outside of the classroom.

Public Lecture, "France & Africa: No Easy Walk to Independence"

October 12, 2010 - 7:30pm - 8:30pm
Location: Belk Library, Room 114
Sponsor: departments of Anthropology, Communication, History, Global Studies, and Government & Justice Studies, with support from the offices of the Provost, the Associate Vice-Chancellor for International Programs and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Stephen Smith is the former Africa Desk Editor and Deputy Foreign Editor of le Monde, and has worked for Libération, Reuters and Radio France International. He currently teaches African Studies, Cultural Anthropology and Public Policy at Duke.

Author of numerous publications, Smith's latest book on France’s Africa policy, Sarko en Afrique, co-authored with Antoine Glaser, was released in Paris in October 2008. Other work includes biographies of Winnie Mandela, Emperor Bokassa and General Oufkir; books on Ivory Coast, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi; as well as reports on Nigeria and the Central African Republic by the International Crisis Group (ICG).

Born in the United States, Stephen Smith studied African law and anthropology at the Sorbonne in Paris, and philosophy, history and political science at the Free University of Berlin, where he submitted his dissertation on "Semiotics of Foreign News Coverage."

Public Lecture, "The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012"

October 11, 2010 - 5:30pm - 6:30pm
Location: I.G. Greer Auditorium
Sponsor: Department of Physics and Astronomy, Department of Anthropology, and the College of Arts and Sciences with the generous assistance of Lenovo.

Dr. Anthony F. Aveni
Colgate University

Dr. Anthony F. Aveni is the Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of Astronomy and Anthropology and Native American Studies at Colgate University. He helped develop the field of archaeoastronomy and now is considered one of the founders of Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy, in particular for his research in the astronomical history of the Maya Indians of ancient Mexico. In this lecture, he will be speaking about his new book, The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012.

Dr. Aveni is considered a pioneer of archeoastronomy and an expert on Mesoamerican ancient astronomy. An award-winning astronomer, he was featured in Rolling Stone magazine’s 1991 list of the 10 best university professors in the country, Aveni was also voted 1982 National Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.

The Internet, bookshelves, and movie theaters are full of prophecies, theories, and predictions that this date marks the end of the world, or at least the end of the world as we know it. Whether the end will result from the magnetic realignment of the north and south poles, bringing floods, earthquakes, death, and destruction; or from the return of alien caretakers to enlighten or enslave us; or from a global awakening, a sudden evolution of Homo sapiens into non-corporeal beings—theories of great, impending changes abound. In the book, Dr. Aveni explores these theories, explains their origins, and measures them objectively against evidence unearthed by Maya archaeologists, iconographers, and epigraphers. He probes the latest information astronomers and earth scientists have gathered on the likelihood of Armageddon and the oft-proposed link between the Maya Long Count cycle and the precession of the equinoxes. He then expands on these prophecies to include the broader context of how other cultures, ancient and modern, thought about the “end of things” and speculates on why cataclysmic events in human history have such a strong appeal within American pop culture.

He also is the author of the books “People and The Sky: Our Ancestors and The Cosmos,” “Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico” and “Conversing With the Planets.”

Lecture, "Into the Whaling Cycle: Cetaceousness and Climate Change among the Inupiat of Artic Alaska"

October 11, 2010 - 1:00pm - 2:00pm
Location: 405 Sanford Hall
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. Chie Sakakibara
Department of Geography and Planning

The Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska identify themselves as the “People of the Whales” and depend on the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) for sustenance and cultural meaning. The bowhead remains central to Iñupiat life and culture through the hunting process, the communal distribution of meat and other body parts, and associated ceremonials and events to sustain cultural well-being, which I call the Iñupiat whaling cycle. For this study, I coined the term cetaceousness to link human awareness with cetaceans or whales. Cetaceousness refers to human-whale interactions at all levels. In Alaska, cetaceousness is a social and emotional process for the Iñupiat to communicate with the whales and one another. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Barrow and Point Hope, Alaska (2004-2007) I show how collective uncertainty about the environment is expressed and managed in Iñupiat practices and, by extension, how deeply global warming penetrates the cultural core of their society. To do so, I illustrate different aspects of Iñupiat-whale relationships. By influencing the bowhead harvest and the Iñupiat homeland, climate change increases environmental uncertainties that both threaten and intensify human emotions tied to identity. Thus, this study shows how collective uncertainty about the future of the environment is expressed and managed in Iñupiat activities and everyday life. My findings demonstrate how the Iñupiat retain and strengthened their cultural identity to survive unexpected difficulties with an unpredictable environment by reinforcing their relationship with the whales. In this presentation, I will also discuss the ongoing community-partnered music heritage repatriation project that I collaborate with the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University.

Lecture: "Growers, Migrant Farm Workers, and the Changing Face of Big Tobacco in North Carolina"

March 18, 2010 - 7:00pm - 8:30pm
Location: Belk Library 114 (Lecture Hall)
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology

Dr. Peter B. Benson
Washington University in St. Louis

Tobacco has changed a lot in the last several decades, and so has North Carolina along with it. This talk explores the major changes that have occurred in North Carolina's tobacco economy, drawing on rich ethnographic field study on tobacco farms around the state. The transformation of tobacco communities in North Carolina speaks to larger themes and broader social patterns in the United States, including Mexican labor migration and changes in work life resulting from economic globalization. While reflecting on what tobacco farmers say about the health aspects of their livelihoods, this talk will also address the tobacco industry's role in shaping regional politics and contributing to major transformations in North Carolina agriculture and social life.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Appalachian Studies, with the generous assistance of an External Scholars Grant awarded by the University Forum Committee. Additional support was provided by the Global Studies Program, HLES, Sustainable Development Program, CERPA, and the Department of Economics.

Faculty Workshop

Dr. Benson will also be leading a workshop at the Hubbard Center on the afternoon of Friday, March 19 (2:30pm) entitled, "Structural Violence, Health Disparities, and Medical Anthropology." This workshop explores key concepts in medical anthropology, the study of health and illness in a cross-cultural perspective. A special emphasis is given to the concepts of social suffering and structural violence. These concepts call attention to the collective ways that most suffering and illness are experienced, as well as the impact of structural disparities in health care access and other essential resources. Dr. Benson will present case studies that examine social suffering and structural violence in the HIV epidemic in Africa, health disparities in the United States, and natural disasters in Haiti and New Orleans. For more information and registration, visit http://workshops.appstate.edu/detail.aspx?key=391

About the Scholar

Dr. Benson was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. His research interests include medical anthropology, public health, political economy, tobacco, agriculture, transnational migration and social theory, especially intersections between phenomenology, existentialism, and cultural anthropology. Bridging the fields of medical anthropology, political economy, and phenomenology, his research is mainly concerned with ethnographic and public health dimensions of international agricultural restructuring. He is involved in showing how agriculture fits into a larger picture of neoliberalism and biopolitics in a globalized world, as well as how the shifting management of markets, labor, and health impacts farm workplace conditions and influences the social, moral, and emotional lives of differently positioned farmers and farmworkers. His field research has been conducted in highland Guatemala, urban and rural Tennessee and North Carolina. His new book (Princeton University Press, forthcoming) covers the tobacco industry, seen from the perspective of rural North Carolina, where he has conducted field research with tobacco farmers and farmworkers - including Mexican and Central American migrants - for the past four years. The book explores the racialized constitution of citizenship and moral values on tobacco farms amidst rapid changes in the international tobacco industry, transnational farm labor migration, the federal government's changing relationship to tobacco production and consumption, and the public health crisis related to smoking. His work expands tobacco's public health picture beyond a narrow focus on smoking to include important social, health, and workplace safety issues related to agricultural production.

2009 events

Fall 2009 Anthropology Senior Student Conference

December 10, 2009 - 3:30pm - 6:00pm
Location: Plemmons Student Union
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Fall 2009 Anthropology Senior Student Conference

Anthropology seniors presented their senior seminar papers over the course of three days. The event was free and open to the public. 

3:30-3:35pm
Welcome and Introduction

3:35-4:05pm
"Post-Reproduction and the Potential Evolutionary Significance of Female Menopause"
Kaitlyn Kluge

4:05-4:35pm
"The Impact of Breastfeeding On Family Concepts: A Cross-Cultural and Biocultural Study"
Brittany Glarrow

4:35-5:05pm
"Archaic Shell Midden Potential Burial Interpretations of the Carleston Annis Site, Kentucky"
Terry Barbour

5:05-5:35pm
"Unraveling the Function of Anasazi Great Kivas in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico"
Nathan Barnes

5:35-6:05pm
"Lithic Advances"
Andrew Coleman

Wednesday, December 9, 3:30-6:30pm, Table Rock Room (201B)

3:30-3:35pm
Welcome and Introduction

3:35-4:05pm
"Rethinking the Postmodern Crisis: An Exploration of Intra-Disciplinary Conflict"
Jesse Proctor

4:05-4:35pm
"Medicine of the Cherokee: Misrepresentations and Gender Divisions"
Natalie Dale

4:35-5:05pm
"Freemasons: The Capacity of Women in a Male-Dominated Society"
Leigh Ann Ashe

5:05-5:35pm
"South African Education: Simplifying Education"
Mariah Brittain

Thursday, December 10, 3:30-6:30pm, Table Rock Room (201B)

3:30-3:35pm
Welcome and Introduction

3:35-4:05pm
"Critical Narratives in Recovery: The Negotiations of the Everyday"
Elizabeth Stabler

4:05-4:35pm
"Mental Illness"
Graham Kilzer

4:35-5:05pm
"Reflections of Mayan Social Life through Folktale"
Lindsay Carter

5:05-5:35pm
"The Role of Storytelling within a Culture: Oral Tradition and its Significance in Appalachia Culture"
Sarah Becker-Seidman

5:35-6:05pm
"The Role of Identity in Constructing Ethnography"
Fotini Spero

Fall 2009 Anthropology Senior Student Conference

December 9, 2009 - 3:30pm - 6:00pm
Location: Plemmons Student Union
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Fall 2009 Anthropology Senior Student Conference

Anthropology seniors presented their senior seminar papers over the course of three days. The event was free and open to the public. 

Tuesday, December 8, 3:30-6:30pm, Multicultural Center

3:30-3:35pm
Welcome and Introduction

3:35-4:05pm
"Post-Reproduction and the Potential Evolutionary Significance of Female Menopause"
Kaitlyn Kluge

4:05-4:35pm
"The Impact of Breastfeeding On Family Concepts: A Cross-Cultural and Biocultural Study"
Brittany Glarrow

4:35-5:05pm
"Archaic Shell Midden Potential Burial Interpretations of the Carleston Annis Site, Kentucky"
Terry Barbour

5:05-5:35pm
"Unraveling the Function of Anasazi Great Kivas in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico"
Nathan Barnes

5:35-6:05pm
"Lithic Advances"
Andrew Coleman

Wednesday, December 9, 3:30-6:30pm, Table Rock Room (201B)

3:30-3:35pm
Welcome and Introduction

3:35-4:05pm
"Rethinking the Postmodern Crisis: An Exploration of Intra-Disciplinary Conflict"
Jesse Proctor

4:05-4:35pm
"Medicine of the Cherokee: Misrepresentations and Gender Divisions"
Natalie Dale

4:35-5:05pm
"Freemasons: The Capacity of Women in a Male-Dominated Society"
Leigh Ann Ashe

5:05-5:35pm
"South African Education: Simplifying Education"
Mariah Brittain

Thursday, December 10, 3:30-6:30pm, Table Rock Room (201B)

3:30-3:35pm
Welcome and Introduction

3:35-4:05pm
"Critical Narratives in Recovery: The Negotiations of the Everyday"
Elizabeth Stabler

4:05-4:35pm
"Mental Illness"
Graham Kilzer

4:35-5:05pm
"Reflections of Mayan Social Life through Folktale"
Lindsay Carter

5:05-5:35pm
"The Role of Storytelling within a Culture: Oral Tradition and its Significance in Appalachia Culture"
Sarah Becker-Seidman

5:35-6:05pm
"The Role of Identity in Constructing Ethnography"
Fotini Spero

Symposium: Indigenous Identity and Oil in the Amazaon

November 23, 2009 - 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Location: Table Rock Room (201B), Plemmons Student Union
Sponsor: Department of Anthropology
Indigenous Identity and Oil in the Amazon
Student Symposium

On Monday, November 23rd, 2009, alumni of the 2009 Andes/Amazon Anthropology Field School presented their research and shared their experiences with the ASU community. As part of an Appalachian Oversees Program led by Dr. Timothy J. Smith, sixteen students spent one month in the Ecuadorian Amazon interacting with several indigenous communities and studying how their identity and history have been shaped by the introduction of oil to the region. Four research teams were formed and charged with conducting original research on the impact of oil, local history, identity/activism, and gender. In addition to learning about research design and gaining experience in interviewing techniques and building rapport with indigenous community members, the students also underwent intensive language training in Quichua, an indigenous language of the Americas which boasts nearly 11,000,000 speakers. After their experience, the students wanted to also share their experiences and observations which shaped their understanding of historical and cultural changes of the Upper Amazon. One of the additional goals of the event was to introduce the ASU community to some of the concerns which indigenous communities have with regards to environmental protection, big oil, and providing indigenous-authored models for sustainable development and eco-tourism.

You can learn more about the Summer 2009 program and student experiences here and the Summer 2010 program here.