Current Presenters
2011-2012

Dr. Robert Cobean, Instituto Nacional de Arqueología e Historia, Mexico
Exploring the Origins of the Toltec State at Tula, Hidalgo, Mexico

Date: Tuesday, April 17, 4:00 p.m.
Location: Furman Hall, room 209
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Latin American Studies

The origins of the Toltec state in the region of Tula, Hidalgo, Mexico can be traced to at least four or five centuries before urban Tula’s apogee circa 1000-1100 A.D. Three decades of investigations by several projects (but especially the settlement pattern program directed by Alba Guadalupe Mastache and Ana Maria Crespo, and subsequent work by Mastache and Cobean) indicate that there probably were several ethnic groups in the Tula region during the Epiclassic and Early Postclassic. Settlement pattern, ceramic, and physical anthropological studies suggest northern (or non-local) origins for some key Epiclassic peoples.

Robert Cobean has conducted archaeological research at Tula, Hidalgo, Mexico for the past thirty years. One of the world's leading experts on Toltec archaeology, Dr. Cobean is currently the Director of the Tula Archaeological Project of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.

Dr. Douglas H. Ubelaker, Smithsonian Institution
Applications of Human Skeletal Biology and Forensic Anthropology in Latin America

Date: Friday, April 13, 4:10 p.m.
Location: Garland 101
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Classical Studies, and the Center for Latin American Studies

Since 1973, research in Ecuador has focused on the recovery and analysis of ancient human remains from archeological contexts.  Analysis has now documented evidence of mortality and morbidity from different geographic regions and all major time periods ranging from preceramic to modern historic.  This research enables a view of long term temporal trends that correlate with key cultural and historic developments.  Recently, scholarly activity also has involved training in forensic anthropology in Latin America and consultation on applications to human rights issues, especially in Chile.

Douglas H. Ubelaker  is Curator at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. and board certified in forensic anthropology by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology. His work is based in North America and Latin America, and he also assists the FBI in forensic cases. He has published numerous articles on physical anthropology and forensics, and co-authored the book Bones: A Forensic Detective's Casebook (1993).

Dr. Leigh Binford, College of Staten Island, CUNY
The Political Economy of Post-Revolutionary Tourism and Historical Memory in El Salvador

Date: Thursday, April 5, 4:00 p.m.
Location: Furman 209
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Latin American Studies

The author discusses "dark tourism" in northern Morazan, El Salvador with special reference to El Mozote, where the Salvadoran army murdered hundreds of civilians in December 1981 in the largest massacre of modern Latin American history.  He focuses on the implications of different wartime and post-war experiences for social memory of the armed conflict and pursuit of social justice in the present.

Leigh Binford  is Chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, College of State Island, CUNY, and Professor in the Department of Anthropology, CUNY.  Dr. Binford is author of The El Mozote Massacre: Anthropology and Human Rights (1996).  Dr. Binford’s research on the intersection of global labor relations, the local effects of transnational corporations, and social movements in Latin America is widely published in journals such as Critique of Anthropology, Dialectical Anthropology, and Journal of Latin American Anthropology.
 

Dr. Timothy R. Pauketat, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Rethinking Ancient Religious Movements in North America

Date: Thursday, March 29, 12:30 p.m.
Location: Furman 209
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities

Relational approaches in archaeology are leading us to rethink the origins of the great ceremonial places and the purposes of monumental constructions in North America and beyond. Using eastern Woodlands revitalization movements and Great Plains medicine bundles as jumping off points, I draw parallels between three archaeological phenomena: Hopewell in Ohio, Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, and Cahokia-Mississippian in Illinois. Focusing on the new evidence of processions and temple deposits at and around the ancient city of Cahokia, I suggest that all such cultural developments were animated by “bundled” engagements of fundamental elements, celestial forces, and people.

Timothy R. Pauketat  is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  A leading scholar of archaeological theory and the archaeology of Native North America, Dr. Pauketat is author of numerous books, including most recently, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (Viking-Penguin Press), Chiefdoms and Other Archaeological Delusions (AltaMira Press), and Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians (Cambridge University Press).  He has edited several important collections, including The Archaeology of Traditions: Agency and History Before and After Columbus (University Press of Florida).

Dr. Frederick H. Smith, College of William and Mary
Alcoholic Marronage: Slave Drinking and Planter Ambivalence in the British Caribbean

Date: Thursday, March 22. 4:00 p. m.
Location: Furman 209
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Department of History, and the Center for Latin American Studies

Historical archaeologists have encountered alcohol-related material culture on the sites of enslaved peoples throughout the Americas, yet historical archaeological evidence has contributed little to our understanding about the role of alcohol in slave societies. What did enslaved peoples drink? Where did they drink? And how did the coercive structures of the slave labor system shape the meaning of alcohol for enslaved peoples? Archaeological investigations at Mapps Cave, a cavern and sinkhole complex in St. Philip, Barbados, help shed light on these questions. Alcohol related materials represent a significant proportion of the Mapps Cave artifact assemblage and indicate that alcohol drinking was one of the primary activities that occurred at the site. Smith will explore the social and symbolic meanings that enslaved peoples at Mapps Cave gave to alcohol use, especially within the context of the 1816 slave uprising, the largest slave revolt in Barbados’ history. Drawing on the work of alcohol studies researchers, I argue that Mapps Cave, a liminal space on the plantation landscape, provided enslaved peoples from surrounding sugar estates with a temporary refuge from the rigors of plantation life, and the use of alcohol at the site enhanced those feelings of escape.

Frederick H. Smith is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary.  Dr. Smith is a historical archaeologist of the Caribbean, with a research focus on British colonialism, inter-colonial relations in the Atlantic World, and the role of alcohol in Caribbean societies.  He is author of two books, Caribbean Rum: A Social andEconomic History, and The Archaeology of Alcohol and Drinking, as well as a great variety of journal articles and chapters in edited volumes.
 

Dr. Sabyne Hyland, St. Norbert College
A Hybrid Khipu/Alphabetic Text from the Central Andes

Date: Thursday, March 15, 4:00 p.m.
Location: Furman 209
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Latin American Studies

This presentation will analyze a newly discovered khipu board, the only text in existence known to contain both alphabetic writing (names) with the corresponding Inka style khipu strings.  Dating to the early 19th century, this khipu board from the Central Andes is the sole surviving exemplar of a tradition of khipu boards that began in 16th century Peru and spread throughout the Andes during the Spanish colonial period.  The distinctive characteristics of the khipu cords and names will be examined, along with the correspondence on this khipu board between knot construction and moiety affiliation.

Sabine Hyland is Associate Professor Anthropology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, St. Norbert College.  Dr. Hyland has done extensive fieldwork and archival experience in Peru, Bolivia, Panama and Spain. She is also the author of two books, The Jesuit and the Incas (Michigan 2003) and The Quito Manuscript: An Inca History Preserved by Fernando de Montesinos (Yale In Press).  Dr. Hyland’s research focuses on the intersections of history, race and gender among indigenous peoples of the Andes. Her work has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  She is currently co-director of the Andahuaylas Archaeology Project in the central Andes of Peru.

 

Dr. Eduardo S. Brondizio
Socio-Ecological Complexity in the Amazon: Reflections From a Household Perspective

Date: Thursday, March 1, 12:00 p.m.
Location: Garland 101
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Latin American Studies

The formation of sociocultural complexity has been a recurrent conceptual crossroad in Anthropology, one that underlies many paradigm shifts and different degrees of causalities and determinisms. Amazonia, past and present, has been a laboratory to these discussions, often marked by an overemphasis on macro-level forces and structural determinism.  This presentation focuses on the importance of understanding social and environmental transformation in the Amazon as part of the interplay between regional structural-historical conditions and local-level dynamics. This reflection is grounded on an examination of families and rural households, their interactions with development programs and external markets, and their contribution in transforming the region in recent times. In a region marked by a history of central planning, the influence of global commodity markets, and by deterministic interpretations, social and environmental change are often thought of, and are often misunderstood, as hierarchically and linearly organized, i.e., conditions set at the macro-scale result in predictable responses at lower levels. On the contrary, understanding the region today and its emerging social-institutional-territorial complexity is predicated on examining family and community-level dynamics, their expectations and heterogeneity, their circulation and social networks in urban areas, and ubiquitous insertion into the region’s territorial governance and resource economy. Using examples based on longitudinal ethnographic and comparative research, my intention is to highlight the differentiated ways that households, communities, and sub-regional units respond to macro-scale forces and policy, and in the process contribute to reconfigure their localities and the region as a whole. The perspective of families and rural communities help us to consider the persisting challenges of cross-level analysis in anthropology and to address questions of regional development and conservation in new ways.

Eduardo S. Brondizio is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change (ACT), Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University Bloomington.
 

Dr. Colleen H. Nyberg
Inequality, stress, and health: exploring the upstream predictors and downstream consequences of cortisol among the Tsimané of the Bolivian Amazon

Date: Wednesday, January 25, 4:10 pm
Location: Buttrick 101
Job talk sponsored by the Department of Anthropology

Given the rapid pace and expanding reach of globalization, stress represents an important biological pathway by which economic and cultural transitions affect health, reflect changes in quality of life, and by which emerging inequalities become instantiated in individual physiology. A major fulcrum of the stress response, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and its main end product cortisol, links brain and body to navigate the ups and downs of life and maintain homeostasis. However, because stress is constructed and experienced within specific political, economic, and cultural contexts, self-reports of stress may not map onto biological experience. Thus, this study will present an objective biomarker of the stress response, cortisol, to evaluate the health impact of rapid cultural and economic change among the Tsimane’, a small-scale indigenous horticulturalist and foraging society in the Bolivian Amazon. Tsimané cortisol levels are dramatically lower than levels reported in U.S. and industrialized populations, which may be calibrated in part, by development in a marginal nutrition and high pathogen milieu. Moreover, various indices of market integration and acculturation are predictors of variation in cortisol profiles, and demonstrate how factors such as rapid lifestyle change, entry into debt relationships with river traders, and emergent income inequality can increase stress hormones and influence the development of health disparities. By explicitly linking such macroscale changes to the individual differences in the stress response, and tracing the related health risk, this project simultaneously addresses the upstream factors, current lived experience, and the downstream consequences of stress among the Tsimane’.

Dr. Amy Non
Genetics, Epigenetics, and the Biological Embedding of Psychosocial Stress

Date: Tuesday, January 17, 4:10 pm
Location: Wilson 103
Job talk sponsored by the Department of Anthropology

In recent decades, researchers from across disciplines have struggled to identify the root causes behind racial disparities in health. While biomedical researchers often test hypotheses about underlying genetic predispositions for disease, social scientists more often focus on social-environmental factors, such as socioeconomic status or perceived psychosocial stress. Few researchers test these competing genetic and sociocultural hypotheses together. In my research based in Puerto Rico, I have integrated ethnographic, genetic, and epidemiological data to isolate and compare the health effects of genetic and social classifications of race. I found that social classification better predicts blood pressure than does genetic ancestry. These results imply that other mechanisms beyond genetics may explain racial disparities in health. A hypothesis of growing interest in anthropology and public health suggests that social experiences can become biologically embedded, especially early in development, to affect health throughout the lifecourse. In one line of my current research, I am exploring epigenetic modifications in early life, to test if adverse exposures in utero may alter genomic structure leading to long-term consequences for adult health. I am currently analyzing genome-wide patterns of DNA methylation in the cord blood of babies born in Boston, MA to mothers with depression and on antidepressants during pregnancy. In a second line of research, I am investigating variation in other biomarkers of health, including markers of endothelial function and inflammation in response to different types of psychosocial stressors in large ongoing cohort studies. Results from both lines of research imply that a more nuanced view of biology, beyond genetics, will be required to ultimately understand racial disparities in health.

Dr. Felicia Madimenos
Reproductive Trade-offs in Skeletal Health & Physical Activity Levels among Indigenous Shuar Forager-horticulturalists of Ecuadorian Amazonia

Date: Friday, Jan. 13, 2012.  12:10pm
Location: Buttrick 102
Job talk sponsored by the Department of Anthropology

Human reproduction is energetically demanding, particularly for women. Pregnancy and lactation entail elevated energy costs, with additional costs of caring for children. In order to satisfy these energetic needs, women can adopt a variety of physiological, behavioral and social strategies. Physiologically, women may reduce energy allocation to other functions, and/or draw on maternal bodily reserves. On a behavioral level, they may reduce energy expenditure, or increase energy/food intake. Socially, women may acquire the additional energy necessary for reproduction and childcare from other individuals. A central question in human biology then involves how people have evolved to satisfy the energetic requirements of human reproduction under different local ecological conditions. Dr. Madimenos will examine energy use among the Indigenous Shuar forager horticulturalists from Amazonian Ecuador. She will investigate the relationships between female reproductive factors and skeletal health, as well as the behavioral adjustments made by women and men to meet the energy demands of reproduction. Madimenos concludes by discussing ongoing and future research that she is conducting with colleagues as part of the Shuar Health and Life History Project, a larger research endeavor which seeks to understand the effects of increasing integration into the market economy on life history trade-offs and health.

Past Presenters
2010-2011

Alexander Bauer - City University of New York
Peru v. Yale: Archaeological Ethics and Legal Issues in the Case of the Hiram Bingham Collection

Date: Friday, April 8, 3 PM (reception to follow)
Location: Bennett Miller Room, Law School
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, Center for Latin American Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, The Curb Center, Vanderbilt Art and Cultural Property Law Association, and Vanderbilt Native American Law Students Association

The ethical and legal issues surrounding cultural and intellectual property and heritage management touch anthropologists, archaeologists, museum professionals, and legal professionals alike. As cultural property disputes generally involve artifact or indigenous knowledge-rich source countries and former colonial powers, their resolution is often a complex political, legal, and ethical negotiation between sovereign nations. Source countries often justify their claims to disputed cultural or intellectual property by means of nationalistic narratives of deep and symbolic connections to the past. On the other hand, consumer countries justify their property interests by arguing they will be better stewards of disputed property, in a better position to share knowledge with the world, and that they should be in a privileged position to interpret and study tangible and intangible cultural property. Over the past year, these issues have come to the fore in a dispute between Yale's Peabody Museum and the nation of Peru. Last December, Peru filed suit against Yale University for the return of seventy-four boxes of artifacts exported from the Inca site of Macchu Picchu in 1916 by explorer Hiram Bingham. This lawsuit represents the first attempt by a nation to repatriate an entire collection, rather than a single enigmatic object. This talk will explore the legal trajectory of the case, and the ethical issues surrounding the repatriation of these objects to Peru. Flyer attached.

Dr. Michael O'Brien - University of Missouri
Cultural Phylogenetics: A New Way of Looking at the Anthropological Record

Date: Thursday, April 7, 4:00 pm
Location: 101 Garland Hall
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology

Phylogeny refers to the genealogical history of any group of things, be they organisms, manuscripts, languages, or anything else that changes over time by means of an ancestor passing on material to an offspring. Phylogeny should be an important issue in both anthropology and archaeology because of their focus on history, that is, on questions about how and why people and their cultural trappings change in certain ways over time. These are evolutionary questions, just as in biology questions about organismal change over time are evolutionary. Not surprisingly, some of the methods that have been devised to examine historical (evolutionary) questions in biology have significant value for the study of cultural phenomena. The transference of methods from biology to anthropology is based on a growing recognition that artifacts, language, and other aspects of culture are phenotypic features in the same way that shells, nests, and bones are phenotypic in the organismal world.\

Dr. Catherine Lutz - Brown University
Militarization and Its Discontents

Date: Thursday, November 11, 4:10 pm
Location: 101 Garland Hall
Sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology and Political Science

Militarization and securitization are two powerful concepts for examining the shaping of social life by military projects and institutions or by discourses of danger.  This talk will examine the militarization of US society since the 1940s, something evident in both growing investments in the military and in the pervasive sense that war is either inevitable or sublime, or both.  It will also describe some of the contradictions or anxieties in the contemporary US setting that appear to serve as challenges to further militarization.

Dr. Bruce Mannheim - University of Michigan
Urban-mestizo language and culture as the “zero degree” of Southern Quechua: Ethnographic, archaeological, and political implications

Date: Thursday, October 28, 4 pm
Location: 101 Garland Hall
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology & The Center For Latin American Studies

Scholars working in the central Andes have frequently taken urban mestizo culture—be it hispanophone or Quechua—as the filter through which they understand Andean languages and cultures, be they  contemporary or prehistoric.  But urban mestizo language and culture differ significantly from their rural counterparts, conceptually and structurally.  These differences are significant in all dimensions of ethnographic analysis and introduce a hidden distortion—or perhaps “domestication” of things Andean.  At the same time, they bring social scientists into inadvertent  collusion with local political stances that preclude understanding Andean cultures in rigorously ethnographic terms. I will draw examples from several different domains:  From the ecological relationship between language and territory, projected backward into prehistory from a very different situation obtaining today; from the formal analysis of the sound structure of the Quechua language; and from the rhetoric of “social marginality”  which served to rationalize a campaign of forced sterilization under the Fujimori regime in the 1990s.

Patricia Isasa
The Long Struggle Against Impunity in Argentina

Date: Tuesday, October 26, 2010, 12:15 pm
Location: Learning Resource Center Seminar Room, Butrick 015
Sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies

In July 1976, Patricia Isasa was kidnapped by a commando group of the provincial police at age 16. She was detained for over 2 and a half years. Since then, she has worked as an architect and a human rights activist, fighting for justice and transparency for over 30 years.

Dr. Andrew Canessa - University of Essex
Sex and the Citizen: Barbies and Beauty Queens in the Age of Evo Morales

Date: Tuesday, October 5, 2010, 4:10 pm
Location: Garland Hall, Room 101
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Latin American Studies

The work of postcolonial scholars such as McClintock and Stoler direct us to look at the erotics of power in colonial and post-colonial relationships, what Ashis Nandy (1983) has called “the homology between sexual and political dominance.”  Bolivia is one of many examples where indigenous people have been dominated through a very gendered exercise of racial power: indian women have been deemed sexually accessible to white men; feminised indians seen as inevitably yielding to the will and enlightened power of the creole oligarchy. In Bolivia in recent years, however, such a formulation of racialised power appears to have been seriously challenged if not reversed.  The ascent of Evo Morales to the presidency has been offered by him and others as an example of a racial revolution in Bolivia where whiteness no longer automatically corresponds to political power.  What is much less clear is how the new presidency and the greater profile given to indigeneity has affected the way power is expressed and symbolised and the kind of racialised citizenship Bolivia is projecting to itself and the world.  Power continues to be expressed in the language of sexual domination and Evo Morales in a series of controversial statements and acts is not immune to expressing his political power in terms of symbolic and real domination of indigenous, white and black women.  His association with beauty queens after the racial controversy raised by Miss Bolivia in 2004 is a case in point.  Leading up to his re-election in 2009 he campaigned hard for the Miss World pageant to come to Bolivia, specifically the city of Santa Cruz which is the source of much opposition to his government.  In his comments and politics he appears to contrast with more ‘traditional’ indigenous masculinities and, to the consternation of many of his supporters, evokes the sexually exploitative behaviour of  the mestizo-creole hacendado.  This paper suggest that surprisingly little has changed about the sex of the citizen, and even less of the caudillo, in the Age of Evo.

Dr. Michael Brown - Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Oakley Center for Humanities & Social Sciences, Williams College
Bureaucratizing Virtue in the New Moral Economy, or, Why Anthropology Should Reconsider its Love Affair with Power

Date: Thursday, April 22
Sponsored by The Department of Anthropology and The Center for Latin American Studies

One expression of the relentless expansion of auditing and bureaucratic accountability in global society is the emergence of certifications of virtue, typically awarded upon successful completion of a procedure designed to insure fairness and objectivity.  In this talk, I analyze regulatory interactions in an American construction project, including the process by which buildings are certified as safe and “sustainable” to bring into focus the complex and sometimes paradoxical effects that highly rationalized regulations have on the subjectivity of those obliged to comply with them.  Under such circumstances, virtue becomes a commodity whose integrity is maintained through ever-widening circles of risk-management and what Michael Power calls “rituals of verification.”  I also consider the tendency of anthropologists to demonize bureaucratic regulation in their ethnographic accounts even as they insist on higher levels of formal accountability in their own communities and workplaces.  Such intimacy with, and ambivalence about, rationalized regulatory frameworks helps to account for the relative scarcity of ethnographic work on bureaucratic systems despite their salience as one of the most pervasive features of modernity.

Dr. Marco Curatola - Professor of History in the Department of Humanities at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru
The Nature of Andean Oracles

Date: Thursday, April 8
Sponsored by VanChiVard, the Department of Anthropology, and the Center for Latin American Studies

All sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chronicles and accounts of the Inca and the other Andean peoples are full of references to "oracles" and oracular practices. Thanks to the documentary sources, we know that in the Inca Empire that developed in the XV century in the Andes there were famed oracular centers--centers that were the hub of pan-Andean pilgrimages, like those of Pachacamac, on the central Peruvian coast; Titicaca, on an island in the lake of the same name; Catequil, in the northern Peruvian highlands; as well as several others of regional and interregional significance. But, can we legitimately assume that pre-Hispanic Peru had divinatory centers with analogous characteristics to those of the oracles of Classical Antiquity? Or are we instead being ethnocentric when we talk of “Andean oracles”, and applying Western concepts to phenomena that have little or nothing in common with the historical experience of the Old World, ultimately hindering a proper understanding of them? In other words, were ancient Andean oracles true oracles? The lecture will answer this question.

Dr. Tom Offit - Asst. Professor of Anthropology, Baylor Univ.
We’ll Inherit the Earth, But We Don’t Want It:  Insecurity and Cultural Reproduction in Peacetime Guatemala

Date: Thursday, April 1
Sponsored by The Department of Anthropology and The Center for Latin American Studies.

Since the signing of the Peace accords in 1996 ending the thirty year civil war, Guatemala has undergone a period of economic and physical insecurity that many believe has been as traumatic as the war itself. In the Maya dominated Western Highlands, these dual insecurities are undermining both the material aspirations of the populace and the spiritual beliefs and expressive culture that have defined their culture for centuries. Focusing on the Monkey’s Dance, the most popular and enduring dance-drama performed in the town of Momostenango , I will examine how epidemic violence that claimed the life of the dances’ spiritual leader has combined with the economic insecurity that has the youth of the town fleeing Momostenango in search of an economic future to threaten the role of the dance as a cultural redoubt for the dancers and the community. As young men, those upon whose backs the burden of cultural reproduction lies, the dancers feel increasingly torn between their avowed desire to renew the Maya world of their ancestors and the demands of physical and economic survival in a world that seemingly has little if anything to do with that of their forbearers.

Dr. Scott Hutson - Asst. Professor of Anthropology, Univ. of Kentucky.
From the bottom up: Social Archaeology at the Ancient Maya City of Chunchucmil, Yucatan, Mexico

Date: Thursday, March 4
Sponsored by The Department of Anthropology and The Center for Latin American Studies.

Mapping, excavation, paleobotany, and soil chemical analyses within houselots at Chunchucmil, an Early Classic (400-600 A.D.) urban center in Yucatan, Mexico, enable detailed reconstructions of daily practices and the use of space. As the social groups occupying these houselots grew, new structures were built and the spatial contexts of practice were transformed. In this presentation, I interpret these changes in the locations of activities from a dwelling perspective. This perspective assumes that a subject’s identity is formed through relations to other people, places and things. Since these relations come into being through daily activities, changes in the context of these activities instigate new social relations and changes in identity. This talk describes the transformations in social relations that resulted from transformations to the built environment. I will also discuss the ways that circulation among public spaces such as alleyways shaped relationships between households.

Frank Salomon - Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Storehouse of Seasons and Mother of Food: Pasa Qullqa, the Communal Deposit of Rapaz, Peru

Date: January 28, 2010
Co-sponsored with Center for Latin American Studies

This talk concerns the community storehouse of Rapaz, Peru, taking a route that starts with architecture and ends with poetry. Rapaz is known for its singular “khipu house,” an old structure containing a collection of cord records seemingly related to the Inka data medium (Ruíz Estrada 1981; Salomon, Brezine and Falcón Huayta 2006:59-92). The “khipu house,” however, needs to be understood as part of a larger unit: a complex of storage and redistribution which it once served to control. We will demonstrate how in Rapaz, administrative and political work was fused with ritual service to wakas and in turn to a peculiar poetics which expresses through verbal art the inner or “emic” side of vertically diverse production.

Rachel Watkins – Department of Anthropology, American University, Washington D.C.
Discrimination and Disparity in Two African American Skeletal Populations: Activity Stress, Trauma, and Cause of Death

Yanna Yannakakis - Assistant Professor of History, Emory University
The Lienzo of Analco: The Spanish Conquest as Narrated by Indian Conquistadors

Date: November 12, 2009
Co-sponsored with Department of History

David Wood - Queen's University Belfast, School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology
Evolution & scripture in Dunedin, 1876: mapping an encounter (followed by thoughts on the case of Alexander Winchell at Vanderbilt: 1878)

Date: November 9, 2009
Co-sponsored with the Department of Physics & Astronomy, Department of History, and Department of English

Sean T. Mitchell - Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University.
Sovereignty, Sabotage, and the State: Ethnography of Brazil's Spaceport after 'Order and Progress'

Richard O’Conner - Department of Anthropology, Sewanee: University of the South.
Explaining Anorexia as an Activity Disease

Date: Thursday, October 6, 2009

Our era knows two anorexias. One, the private hell that anorexics suffer, is lived quietly rather than spoken. The other, a contentious debate over gender, genetic and media causes, is spoken loudly rather than lived. Although well intentioned, that discourse silences anorexics and misconstrues anorexia by looking through anorexics to some underlying pathology or beyond them to societal ills. Where it doesn’t look—at least not long, hard and thoughtfully—is at the anorexic as a moral actor and at anorexia as an activity that takes on a life of its own. Our research puts the anorexic’s experience at the center of how this pathology develops.  By interviewing recovered anorexics in Tennessee and Toronto, we found this exotic disease has perfectly ordinary origins.  It begins in childhood when especially sympathetic, virtuous and achieving children master the deferred gratification that our society esteems.  Over the years they develop a constitutional capacity for self-denial that later makes anorexia not only possible but attractive.  As these children come of age, in separating themselves from a youth culture that celebrates indulgence, they assert their disciplined character by taking up projects of virtuous self-improvement (healthy eating, athletic training, weight loss).  Initially exhilarated by their success, they commit more and more of who they are to what they’re doing until the person becomes the project.  In effect these achievers bootstrap themselves into anorexia the way ambitious athletes train themselves into Olympians.

Past Presenters - 2008-2009

John Doebley - Professor of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and leading researcher on plant genetics
Maize Domestication and Improvement in the Americas: A Window into Changing Relations Between Humans and Their Crops

Lindsay Smith - Northeastern University
Subversive Genes: Reconstituting Identity in Post-Dictatorship Argentina

John Verano - Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Tulane
A Hole in the Head: Trepanation in Ancient Peru