Events
The Department of Anthropology convenes diverse seminars, workshops, and other gatherings throughout the academic year. Navigate the categories to the left to learn more.
Events
Sanghamitra Das
March 25, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall
“Tribal” Sickle Cell: Biomolecular Hope, Reproductive Surveillance, and Adivasi Agency at India’s Margins Dr. Sanghamitra Das University of Chicago
ABSTRACT: There is a new biopharmaceutical regime emerging around sickle cell disease in India. A rare genetic blood disorder globally racialized as a “Black disease”, over the past three decades, sickle cell disease has been mapped onto historically oppressed Dalit and Adivasi communities in India. Caste-based assumptions of biological difference led Indian physicians, scientists and policymakers to characterize Indigenous Adivasi communities as the original “repositories” of the sickle cell gene, leading to anxieties of genetic admixture. Biomedical experts, the State and multinational pharmaceutical corporations thus partnered to mitigate these anxieties and promote “tribal” health, generating what Das terms as “biomolecular hope” around futuristic sickle cell therapies. Adivasi articulations of medical and social justice however reveal both the scopes and limits of “biomolecular hope”—an amalgamation of scientific epistemologies, prospective biopharmaceuticals, and subjective aspirations. Embodying “biomolecular hope” means consensually participating in the State surveillance of one’s genome and reproductive behavior. Situated in three distinct regions constituting the margins of India—the insurgency affected state of Chhattisgarh, the plantation district of the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu, and the tea plantations of Assam—“biomolecular hope” captures the tensions between capital-driven “tribal” health development policies and Adivasi aspirations of well-being. In so doing, it illuminates the role of caste-based notions of human difference in the relationship between the Indian State and its Adivasi citizens.
BIOGRAPHY: Sanghamitra Das is the Critical Caste Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Anthropology and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research brings together Medical Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, and Dalit and Adivasi studies to investigate health as an intersectional question of justice for historically oppressed communities in India, and beyond.
Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Das’s talk.
Orisanmi Burton
April 8, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Methods of Carceral War Dr. Orisanmi Burton American University
ABSTRACT: Grounded in a criminalized tradition of Black radical analysis, this lecture reframes “mass incarceration” as carceral war. In doing so, it demystifies the U.S. prison system as a modality of counter-insurgency. Challenging popular conceptions of “correctional institutions” as inert sites of penological intervention, it illuminates the prison’s hidden technologies of subjugation and charts their relation to global archives of colonial power. By theorizing the prison in this way, this talk foregrounds the complex and protracted formations of Black Revolt against which prisons are constantly mobilized. It demonstrates that the imperative of “neutralizing” the very possibility of Black Revolt is a primary historical driver of prison expansion and innovation. Here “method” takes on a dual meaning, referring not only to the techniques through which scholars can apprehend, theorize, and write about this war, but more importantly, how it is concretely imposed and contested. Without understanding carceral spaces as zones of undeclared domestic war, zones that are inextricably linked to imperial and officially acknowledged wars abroad, we cannot fully understand how and why the United States became the global leader of incarceration that it is today, nor will we be able to effectively fight back.
BIOGRAPHY: Orisanmi Burton is an assistant professor of anthropology at American University. His research employs ethnographic and archival methods to examine historical collisions between Black radical organizations and state repression in the United States. Dr. Burton’s work has been published in North American Dialogue, The Black Scholar, Radical History Review, American Anthropologist, among other outlets, and has received support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and The Margarite Casey Foundation, which selected him as a 2021 Freedom Scholar. Dr. Burton’s first book, entitled Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt was published by the University of California Press in October of 2023.
Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Burton’s talk.
Elizabeth A. Davis
April 15, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall “A Rubbish Dump of Love”: Artifacts and Historical Experience in Cyprus Dr. Elizabeth A. Davis Princeton University
ABSTRACT: This talk addresses public secrecy and evidence in Cyprus in the context of radical social division that has endured for half a century. I explore how material remains of war such as bones and archival images gather meaning, political force, and orientations to the future in scientific and artistic knowledge production about a shared history of violence. In the context of long-enduring division, and the long-enduring co-existence of incompatible narratives about the past, memory and historical knowledge are especially fragile and falsifiable. I introduce the concept of artifactuality to comprehend how forensic and documentary epistemologies and practices may work to stabilize that knowledge. Artifactuality describes an experience of time, and an interpretation of that experience, anchored by material objects that survived the conflicts and remain available for study, re-use, and re-contextualization. In this talk, I frame bones and archival images as artifacts that play a central role in Cypriots’ knowledge projects about the past as they work to countervail deeply entrenched political secrecy. I pay special attention to the complex operation of recursive time in Cypriot documentary films: in their visualization of ruins and bones, in their incorporation of archival images to represent memories, and in their treatment of archival photographs and film as materials subject to damage, decay, and doctoring. I argue that, when we consider archival images as artifacts in these ways, we may better sense the resonances between forensic and documentary knowledge projects, which entail specific processes of destruction in the very practices by which knowledge is produced; and I consider how ethnographic storytelling may synergize with those practices.
BIOGRAPHY: Elizabeth Davis is Associate Professor of Anthropology, where she teaches psychological anthropology, sensory and visual anthropology, social theory, and ethnographic methods of research and writing. Her research focuses on the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean: Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey. Her first book, Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece (Duke University Press, 2012), is an ethnographic study of responsibility among psychiatric patients and their caregivers in the “multicultural” borderland between Greece and Turkey. Her most recent book, Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing (Duke University Press, 2023), addresses public secrecy and knowledge projects about the violence of the 1960s-70s that led to the enduring division of the island, including forensic investigations and visual archives. She has another book in press, coming out this fall from Fordham University Press, entitled The Time of the Cannibals: On Conspiracy Theory and Context, addressing conspiracy theory and presidential power in Cyprus and beyond. Beyond these projects, she has written on economic crisis and suicide in Greece, and she is currently studying Orthodox and heterodox death rituals and burial practices in monastic and worldly contexts of “crisis” and austerity. She is also collaborating on a documentary film about the public life of sacred bones in Cyprus.
Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Davis’s talk.
Agustín Fuentes
April 29, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Agustín Fuentes Princeton University
Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Fuentes’s talk.
Janet Roitman
May 6, 2024 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall Dr. Janet Roitman RMIT University
Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Roitman’s talk.
Undergraduate Thesis Symposium
Please join us on May 20 in Haskell Hall 315 for this year’s Anthropology Undergraduate Symposium, which will showcase the work of graduating fourth years who have completed a BA Thesis for Departmental Honors.