THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
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
Jason Pribilsky
December 2, 2024
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Caged Birds and Wandering Stars: A Medical Anthropology of Retained Bullets, Paralysis, and Gun Violence
Dr. Jason Pribilsky
Whitman College
ABSTRACT: What passes for discourse regarding guns and gun violence in the US rarely focuses on the terminus of a gun’s firing – the physical wound and the material effects of what a gun does to the body. Similarly, in the political calculus of guns where homicides dominate, most people who are shot survive, yet the dead paradoxically have more political agency in firearms debates. However, in recent years as gun violence spreads, the wound has taken on a political life of its own, from the activism of trauma surgeons releasing moving images of bloodied ORs, to calls to release photos from mass shootings, to the activism of wounded survivors. This talk presents material from a new book project with the provisional title, Revealed in the Wound: A Social Ballistics of the US Gun Crisis. Blending medical humanities and ethnography, the project asks: what happens when we center the wound in our thinking about guns and the externalities of their use? Building off theorizing in medical anthropology and the work of disability scholars and activists, it explores how wounds can be both relational and generative of new political horizons.
While the larger project draws on various historical tendrils of the wound in arts and politics, this talk presents an ethnographic portion of the work at the interface of the effects of gun violence and medical trauma care. It looks at survivors who are left paralyzed by a gun’s wounding and, in the majority of cases, live with bullets retained in their bodies. Focusing on the slow violence of wounding, it considers how attention to the long repair after gunshot may open new ways to conceptualize responses to gun violence that move beyond the usual politics of guns.
BIOGRAPHY: Jason Pribilsky is a Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Whitman College in Washington State, specializing in medical anthropology, migration, indigenous movements, and the history of anthropology. Most of his fieldwork has been in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Andes. He is the author of La Chulla Vida: Gender, Migration and the Family in Andean Ecuador and New York City and nearly completed second book, Culture’s Laboratory: Midcentury Modern Anthropology, Indian Problems and the Cold War Imaginary in the Peruvian Andes. His research and writing have been supported by the School for Advanced Research, the Fulbright Program, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His current research project also builds on a background in public health.
Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Pribilsky’s talk.
Krystal A. Smalls
February 24, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Dr. Krystal A. Smalls
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Anna T. Browne Ribeiro
March 3, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Dr. Anna T. Browne Ribeiro
University of Louisville
Aalyia Sadruddin
March 31, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Dr. Aalyia Sadruddin
Wellesley College
Jennifer C. Hsieh
April 7, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Dr. Jennifer C. Hsieh
University of Michigan
Usha Reena Rungoo
April 14, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Dr. Usha Reena Rungoo
Harvard University
Undergraduate Thesis Symposium
May 12, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall
Undergraduate Thesis Symposium
Please join us 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.
The symposium will be followed immediately by a department picnic in the Classics Quad outside Haskell Hall.