Events
Lecture Series
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
Date: Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 4pm
Location: Wilson 126
Frank Salomon - Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.Co-sponsored with the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies This presentation investigates patterns of activity stress, trauma and cause of death in two skeletal series from Washington, DC (W. Montague Cobb Skeletal collection) and St.Louis (Robert J. Terry skeletal collection) dating to the early and mid-20th century. Similarities and differences in the prevalence and distribution of these conditions are examined to understand the extent to which both far-reaching and localized racial discrimination policies impacted biological well being. Newspapers, municipal reports and historical studies are used to identify the social and economic circumstances of blacks in St. Louis and Washington, DC, as well as the de jure and de facto discriminatory practicesthat impacted health. Data reveal very different health and disease patterns in the two samples, thus illustrating the diverse responses that low SES populations can have to stressors associated with local experiences of poverty and inequality. Date: January 28, 2010 Location: TBA Co-sponsored with Center for Latin American Studies Past Presenters 2009-2010 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'
Date: Thursday, October 29, 2009 This paper traces the narratives stemming from the explosion of Brazil's VLS-1 satellite launch rocket in 2003. The explosion killed 21 Brazilian technicians on the launch pad, but has never been explained to the satisfaction of many Brazilian observers. I examine differing explanations for the explosion, chiefly among three affected groups: villagers around the spaceport, proponents of a neoliberal and civilian space program, and nationalists in the Brazilian military. The importance of the launch to Brazil's space program, the event's gruesome outcome, the opacity of its causes, and the secrecy surrounding its investigation have made the event a potent metonym for these groups' ideas about the Brazilian nation-state and its perceived purposes and failures during a period of contestation over neoliberal governance. An argument for the importance of ethnography at multiple scales and among multiple groups is implicit throughout the paper. By examining narratives about the explosion in their widely different sociopolitical contexts, this paper attempts to model an effective multi-scalar political ethnography as it charts the shifting fault lines of conflict over development, sovereignty, and inequality in contemporary Brazil.
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. 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
Symposia
Maya Culture: Identity, Language and History
A Celebration of the Life and Work of Pierre Robert Colas September 25-27, 2009 123 Buttrick Hall Organizers: Lesley Gill, Sergio Romero, Norbert Ross, and Miriam Shakow Presenters: Victoria Bricker, Sergio Romero, Judie Maxwell, Marc Zender, Christophe Helmke, James Brady, Fernando Tzib, Frauke Sachse For more information, visit http://www.vanderbilt.edu/colasconference/.
Graduate Brown Bag Lunch Group
Organizers: Marlon Escamilla and Caissa Revilla Minaya
Upcoming Presenters Hayley E Smith - Graduate Assistant, Vanderbilt University Dialect Contact in Writing: Examples from Online Science Fiction Fandom Date: Friday, December 4, 2009, 12 PM Location: 002-A Garland Hall Past Presenters 2009-2010 Lauren Kohut - Graduate Assistant, Vanderbilt University Archaeological Applications of Spatial Network Analysis: A Case Study from Malata, a Colonial Mission Site in the Southern Peruvian Highlands Date: Friday, November 13, 2009 In early colonial Spanish America, religious conversion was intimately linked to a larger program of social order. In writing, colonial officials and religious clerics stressed the importance of the built environment in creating proper Christian colonial subjects, belying a largely deterministic understanding of the ordering capabilities of the built environment. However, the Spanish did not find a tabula rasa in the Americas and were ultimately forced to contend with native ideologies of space. GIS-based spatial network analysis provides one means of examining how these distinct spatial practices were negotiated at the site of Malata, an Inka provincial outpost that became an early doctrina in the southern Peruvian highlands. In this talk I hope to use the results of the network analysis from this case study to demonstrate some of the ways GIS can be used to address archaeological and anthropological questions and datasets. Amanda Garrison - Graduate Assistant, Vanderbilt University Ground Stone Tools at Khonkho Wankane Date: Friday, October 30, 2009 This study focuses on the analysis of spatial distribution of ground stone artifacts related to function from the Formative site of Khonkho Wankane, located in the Bolivian altiplano. Ground stone tools are an extremely under analyzed artifact type that can provide information concerning specialization, increase in food production, and feasting activities. I found that size, shape, and types of ground stone varied between different residential and ritual spaces that are separated by walls, architectural styles, and patio groupings. I argue that the differences in types of ground stone relate to the different activities that were occurring at the site in different residential and ritual areas. 2008-2009 Jennifer Vogt - Graduate Assistant, Vanderbilt University Gerson Levi-Mendes - Graduate Assistant, Vanderbilt University Minam ethnohistory Mike Tidwell - Graduate Assistant, Vanderbilt University Ethnographic research in east Tennessee Danielle Kurin - Graduate Assistant, Vanderbilt University Ethnic violence in ancient Peru Brendan Weaver - Graduate Assistant, Vanderbilt University Archaeological research in Potosi, Bolivia Catherine Timura - Research associate, Vanderbilt University Medical anthropological research in Salasaca, Ecuador
Discussion Groups
South American Discussion Group (SADG)
Contact Brendan Weaver for readings Mesoamerican Discussion Group (MADG) Location and time TBA Bioarchaeology Discussion Group (BADG) Location and time TBA |