The most recent issue of the journal Anthropology Today contains an interview with UBC’s Anthony Shelton, Director of the Museum of Anthropology and Professor of Anthropology:

Negotiating new visions: An interview with Anthony Shelton by Gustaaf Houtman

“In his interview, Anthony Shelton reflects on his past 25 years working in museums and universities and the changing relationship between anthropology and ethnographic exhibitions and museum practices. Shelton talks about the field of critical museology which he has theorized and set out over many years and which stands as a substantial critique of conventional museum practice, and answers questions about the emergence and potential of new radical approaches to the exhibition of indigenous cultures as exemplified by the UBC Museum of Anthropology’s multi-million dollar project, ‘A Partnership of Peoples’ which is due to open in January of 2010.”

UBC Library subscribes to the journal Anthropology Today. You can read the fulltext online at: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123192876/abstract

The Department of Anthropology and the Laboratory of Archaeology invite you to Archaeology Day 2009. The theme this year is Archaeology at UBC and Beyond: Welcoming Our Neighbors.

This event takes place this Saturday, March 14th, in room 207 in the ANSO building at UBC.

For more information, see a pdf of the schedule here.

A reminder of two talks in the Anthro Department this week:

Wednesday December 3, 11:30-1:00 @ AnSo 134
Neanderthals and beyond: Environment, Extinction, and Social Connection in the Caucasian Paleolithic
Dr. Naomi Cleghorn, Human Evolution Research Center, University of California – Berkeley

and

Thursday December 4, 11:00-12:30 @ AnSo 134
The Evolution of Human Diets
Prof. Michael Richards, Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology

A reminder of tomorrow’s talk by Laëtitia Atlani-Duault at 12:00 noon, AnSo 205

Humanitarian Aid in Post-Soviet Countries: An Anthropological Perspective

In this talk, based on her book of the same name, Prof. Atlani-Duault discusses the role of “that exotic tribe, humanitarian and development workers, along with their state and non-state partners, as they ‘export democracy’ to post-soviet countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Laëtitia Atlani-Duault is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University Nanterre, Paris, France and a frequent consultant with humanitarian and development aid agencies in Central Asia and the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and Asia.

We have two of Dr.Atlani-Duault’s books in Koerner Library: Humanitarian aid in post-Soviet countries : an anthropological perspective, plus the French original, Au bonheur des autres : anthropologie de l’aide humanitaire.

A reminder of today’s talk by Hilary Pilkington, from 11:30am-1:00pm, AnSo 205:

The weight of the Vorkuta sky: Young people’s visual and verbal articulations of ‘place’

This paper is work in progress based on recently completed fieldwork in a deindustrialised city in the Russian far north undertaken under the auspices of a transnational European project on ‘Subcultures and Lifestyles’. It considers how a common structural constraint on young people – ‘place’ – impacts upon their visual and verbal articulation of their everyday regardless of (sub)cultural affiliation. The paper outlines key tropes of young people’s narratives about ‘place’, highlighting: the natural (landscape and territorial isolation); the social (Vorkuta’s emergence as a city through forced and temporary settlement); and the cultural (the heritage of prison camp and criminal gang culture). The paper pays attention to: the comparisons and contrasts between respondent and researcher representations of a particular urban space; the fusions and dissonances between the visual and the verbal articulations of place among respondents; and the changing representation of their engagement with urban space by respondents over a period of four years of research. Finally, the paper considers how young people engage reflexively with these verbal and visual representations of place through symbolic displays and performances of the ‘deviant’ heritage of the city.

Hilary Pilkington is a member of the Sociology department at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on the study of Russian society especially youth cultural practice, drug use, migration and displacement, ethnic and national identity including Muslim identity and the rise of xenophobic sentiments.

Books written or edited by Dr. Pilkington can be found in Koerner Library, including:

• Islam in post-Soviet Russia : public and private faces (ebook also available through UBC Library here)
• Migration, displacement, and identity in post-Soviet Russia (ebook also available, click here)
• Gender, generation and identity in contemporary Russia (ebook also available, click here)
• Russia’s youth and its culture : a nation’s constructors and constructed (ebook also available, click here)

A reminder of the upcoming ANTH colloquium, presented by Sandra Evers, 11:30 – 13:00 ANSO 205

Longing and Belonging in Real Time: How Chagossian Children in Mauritius See Themselves and the Chagos Islands

The original inhabitants of the Chagos islands in the Western Indian Ocean were deported from their archipelago to the Seychelles and Mauritius during the late 1960s and early 1970s to make way for a U.S. military base. This paper is based on a study of a group of those Chagossians who settled in the poorer quarters of Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius. The research focussed on Chagossian children enrolled in the final years of primary school and discusses the impact of Mauritian education policies and practices on these pupils. The central query traces how gendered processes of marginalisation take shape in primary schools under the influence of a broader stereotype held by Mauritians that Chagossians are destined for a life in the margins of their society. Within this context, the challenges faced by Chagossian girls are discussed through their agency, interdependencies, coping strategies. This analysis is intertwined with their views on the historical fate of the Chagossians, their understandings of family history and imagined life in Chagos.

Sandra J.T.M. Evers is associate professor and senior researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, VU University Amsterdam. She specialises in South West Indian Ocean studies, with a particular focus on Madagascar, Mauritius and the Seychelles. Dr Evers’ principal areas of research cover migration, slavery, memory and cognition, identity construction, frontier societies within the context of globalisation, natural resource management, poverty and sustainable development.

A reminder of today’s ANTH Colloquia talk, 12-1:30 pm, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre Lillooet Room (Room 301):

The Black Hole of Empire, by Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University

Partha Chatterjee is an internationally renowned Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial scholar. He is a multi-disciplinary scholar, with special emphasis on political science, anthropology and history. He is a professor of Political Science and was the Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and is presently a Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York.

UBC Library has a number of Dr. Chatterjee’s books, including:

A reminder of tomorrow’s Anthropology colloquium by Ron Kuzar, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Haifa

The Internal Palestinian Debate on the Right of Return: On National Discourses and Beyond

October 7th from 11:30-1:00 in ANSO 205

I will start with a (partial) lexical analysis of the term “return”. I will show how different meanings are selected in the internal Palestinian debate on the right of return between maximalists and pragmatists, and how reality is narrated so as to discursively harmonize with the lexical choices. Then I will present and discuss Anton Shammas’s short story Autocartography: The Case of Palestine, Michigan. Shammas (an Israeli Palestinian author, who writes in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, and is currently a professor of literature at Ann Arbor, Michigan) subverts, ridicules, and counters the whole debate from within, challenging thereby both the Israeli and the Palestinian national discourses from the vulnerable position of personal and collective hybridity.

Note: If you’d like to read the story beforehand, it has been reprinted in the Palestine – Israel Journal, 9(2), 2002, pp. 111–119. UBC Library subscribes to the Palestine Israel Journal online; you can find the reprinted story via here via Academic Search Complete.

The story also appeared in the the edited volume The Geography of Identity, available in print at Koerner Library.

This Thursday October 2, from11:30-13:00 in ANSO 205, you’re invited to a screening of Face á la tempête – Weather the Storm, the newest production of the Ethnographic Film Unit at UBC.

Drawing from more than a decade of research, UBC anthropologist Charles Menzies tells the story of small scale fishermen in Brittany France. The film is a collaboration between anthropologist and community members and filmmaker Jennifer Rashliegh.

The Ethnographic FIlm Unit at UBC sponsors screenings of new films produced by unit members and associated filmmakers.

A reminder of tomorrow’s Anthropology colloquium:

Worlding Cities, Pied-a-terre Subjects

September 16th – 12-2pm
Green College Coach House
Co-sponsored with Center for Cross-Faculty Inquiry

The rise of Asian cities as centers of spectacle and speculation challenges conventional notions about the global city as a site of universal human rights. I argue that the ambitious Asian city is a branded state-space, a spectralized site that coordinates and generates flows of global knowledge, actors, and values. Pied-a-terre subjects, especially knowledge nomads, are recruited and favored for their production of diverse material and symbolic values. But, while pied-a-terre subjects are crucial to the prestige and wealth of the worlding city, they are the embodiment of the denationalized character of capitalism. Poised between staying and going, the knowledge nomad performs a transfer of value that shapes the hyper-metropolis as both a national space and a site of mutating citizenship.

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Ong is the author of many books on modernity, citizenship, sovereignty, and neoliberalism in emerging Asia-Pacific contexts. Her works can be found in Koerner Library; click here to see a list.