A reminder of the talk today by Masami Toku, University of California, Chico:

The Power of Girls’ Comics: What can Shojo Manja Tell You?

Shojo Manga “Girl Power” Manga (Japanese comics) has played an important role in Japanese society. Not just tales of love, these illustrated stories empower the girls of Japan and aid them in traversing the intricate societal roles and expectations females face in Japan. Blending ink and storytelling, the Manga can simultaneously be viewed as entertainment, art and a reflective study in pop culture. This presentation on Manga focuses on those published specifically for Shojo (young girls) and the author’s world-touring exhibit featuring a variety of posters, prints and books spanning over 60 years of art and style. While the early Shojo Manga remains timeless in its unique style and storytelling, it is the contemporary Manga and artwork that has transcended borders and has received great interest throughout the world. This presentation will look at the role Shojo Manga has played and continues to play in Japanese society and through reflection of 60 years of artwork, observing how the lives of young girls and women have changed in Japan since the post-war era through today. “Girl Power!” focuses on a period of Japanese history that has seen women’s position in society undergo drastic changes, and that path is documented through Shojo Manga.

Friday, November 16, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm
Buchanan B323

A reminder of today’s Anthropology Colloquium by Dr. Ken Ames, Anthropology, Portland State University:

Financing Hunter-Gatherer Complexity: production and elite strategies on the Lower Columbia River

Thursday, November 15
11:30-1:00 pm in AnSo 205

Recent publications written or edited by Dr. Ames and held at UBC Library include:

The Archaeological Society of British Columbia presents a lecture today by David Schaepe of the Dept of Anthropology, UBC:

“Housepits and Households: 3,000 Years of Community Development among the Sto:lo”

Thursday, November 15th at 7:30 pm
Vancouver Museum, Early History Gallery
1100 Chestnut Street, Vancouver, BC

“Hundreds of ancient housepit features populate the mainland Gulf of Georgia Region, southwestern B.C. – homeland of the Halkomelem-speaking Stó:lō (‘People of the River’). Archaeologists have documented housepits in the region for over 60 years, yet little remains known about their range of shapes and sizes, how these feature are arranged within settlements, or how such settlements have changed through time. Building on work from the collaborative Fraser Valley Project, this presentation describes current research exploring 114 housepit features from 11 different settlements located between the Central Fraser Valley and lower Fraser Canyon. These results provide insight into the formation of Stó:lō pithouses, households, and community organization over the last 3,000 years (ca. 500 B.C. – 1850 A.D)”.

A reminder of today’s talk by Dr. Alexia Bloch, Department of Anthropology, UBC:

Post-Soviet Mistresses and the Turkish State:Negotiating Intimacy, Kinship, and Labor Migration in a Time of Transnationalism

Wednesday, Nov 14, 2007 at 12:00 noon
Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies
1896 East Mall (show me a map)

Abstract:
While historically the Soviet Union had elaborate trade, cultural, and political exchanges with nearby regions, from the 1930s to late 1980s these connections were extremely limited and average citizens were not permitted across the “closed” borders. With the breakdown of the Soviet Union, this radically changed and now more than 15 years later extensive labor migration out of the region both challenges border control efforts and creates new economic and socio-cultural configurations, including in regard to structures of kinship and intimacy. This paper, grounded in ethnographic research (2002-2007), examines how post-Soviet women employed as domestic workers and shop assistants in Istanbul are part of a growing post-Soviet population of undocumented workers who maintain ties to home– frequently in Moldova and Ukraine–but also build long-term strategic kinship relations as wives and mistresses of Turkish men. The paper argues how the strategic kinship and intimacy employed by women who have lived and worked in Istanbul for as long as a decade can be seen as facilitated by a Turkish state that provides laborers with few means of regularizing their status. Many levels of society, including the state, are complicit in maintaining a marginal status for post-Soviet labor migrant women, since their inexpensive labor is directly linked to the expansion of key economic sectors such tourism and textile manufacturing, and, through their domestic service, to the participation of middle-class Turkish women in the paid labor force. The strategic forms of intimacy­as long-term mistresses­that are employed by Post-Soviet women demonstrate the ways in which “kinship” is, as Michael Herzfeld has recently written (2007), not a fixed system, but “. . . deeply embedded in the life cycle” (2007:320). In the case of post-Soviet women, labor migration has come to define a normative aspect of one stage in the life cycle, mid-life. Overall, this paper argues that post-Soviet migrants’ efforts to “make kinship” reflect a global pattern whereby transnational flows of women’s labor are contingent upon gender regimes in receiving countries, but are also part of a “global national hierarchy” which enables particular constellations of intimate relations.

Bio:
Alexia Bloch’s current research concerns emerging capitalism and the transformation of gender relations in regions of the former Soviet Union. In particular, over the past five years she has conducted ethnographic research on women labor migrants moving between areas of the former Soviet Union and centers of global capital such as Istanbul, Turkey. Her publications include articles in the journals Canadian Woman Studies and Cultural Anthropology, as well as book chapters in volumes focused on issues of trafficking and international migration. She is also the author of two monographs– Red Ties and Residential Schools: Indigenous Siberians in a Post-Soviet State (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); and The Museum at the End of the World: Encounters in the Russian Far East (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Alexia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology.

A reminder of today’s Anthropology colloquium by Dr. David Mosse, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Oriental and African Studies (London):

The appearance of identity politics in a south Indian village

A view on the shifting meaning of caste and its rise as an idiom of rights from a return visit to a fieldwork village after 23 years.

Thursday, November 8, 11:30-1:00 pm
Room 120 C. K. Choi Building, Institute of Asian Research

Dr. Mosse is the author and editor of a number of publications, including most recently:

• Development brokers and translators : the ethnography of aid and agencies / edited by David Lewis and David Mosse. 2006.
• Aid effect : giving and governing in international development / edited by David Mosse and David Lewis. 2005.
• Cultivating development : an ethnography of aid policy and practice / David Mosse. 2005.

Co-sponsored by the Centre for Indian and South Asian Research, Institute for Asian Research

A reminder of tomorrow’s colloquium by Cécile Vigouroux, French Dept., SFU:

Examining Professional Vision and the Researcher’s Institutional Authority through the Examination of a Transcription Activity

“Transcription is part of any researcher’s professional practice, especially for researchers working on or with oral language. Besides being a practice, transcription has also become an object of enquiry in linguistics, especially linguistic anthropology, since the 1980s. Most of the approaches to transcription have in common the fact of examining it from the point of view of its outcome: the scription. My point of departure is different: in order to deconstruct scription, I look upstream and investigate the activity that produces it, thus focusing on the trans process”

For more details and to read the full abstract, visit the UBC Anthropology Department Colloquium page.

For related reading, see:

Vigouroux, C. (2007). Trans-scription as a social activity: an ethnographic approach.
Ethnography, 8(1), 61-97

(UBC Library subscribes to the ejournal Ethnography; click the article title to view the article.)

A reminder about the Medical Anthropology Seminar today:

“Magic genes” [genies?] in a bottle: Families’ experiences with new genetic therapies for a fatal childhood illness

Christopher J. Condin, Doctoral Fellow
Canadian Institutes of Health Research – Genetics
Department of Anthropology
3:30-4:30 pm in ANSO 205

We have Christopher Condin’s 2005 MA thesis from the Department of Anthropology in Koerner Library if you’d like to read more, post-talk, on the anthropology of families and genetic therapy. It’s called “The changing meaning of gene therapy : exploring the significance of curative genetic research in the narratives of families with Duchenne muscular dystrophy” and it’s in the microform collection at AW5 .B71 2006-0024 – ask for help if you can’t find it.

Dr. Michael Blake from the Department of Anthropology gives a talk this Tuesday October 16th at 7:00 p.m at the Museum of Anthropology:

Maize: The Plant that Colonized the World

Teams of scientists using a wide array of new techniques for detecting and studying ancient maize (corn) throughout the Americas are making surprising new discoveries about where, when and how the plant was first domesticated. They are also tracing its journey from 10,000 years ago in south-western Mexico, to the far reaches of South America and the borderlands between Canada and the U.S. By examining some of these new discoveries, ways that maize and humans forged a kind of mutual dependency in the millennia following its domestication will be explored. The ancient adaptability of Maize is reflected in its present-day roles as one of the world’s top three food crops and as a potential source of biofuel—ethanol—moving us through to the 21st century.

For further reading, see:

Histories of maize : multidisciplinary approaches to the prehistory, linguistics, biogeography, domestication, and evolution of maize / edited by John E. Staller, Robert H. Tykot, Bruce F. Benz.

People and plants in ancient western North America / edited by Paul E. Minnis.

The story of corn / Betty Fussell.

——

Photo credit: r-z

Reminder of an upcoming talk this Friday noon:

Music, Culture and Indigenous Thought in Busoga, Uganda: Cultural Survival and Revival at Mpambo, the African Multiversity

A talk by Paulo Wangoola including discussion about field recording by Shawn Hall. The two choirs associated with Mpambo were recorded by Shawn Hall during a visit in 2004 and samples will also be played.

Details:
Friday, April 27th, 2007 from Noon – 1:30pm
Asian Centre, Room 101, UBC

Paulo Wangoola, Nabyama (Founder-President) of the Mpambo Afrikan Multiversity, a recently established and village-based institution of research and higher education dedicated to the revitalization of African Indigenous Thought and Spirituality. The Mpambo campus is located in Isegero, Iganga in Busoga, Eastern Uganda. As part of the work of Mpambo, there is both an Mpambo traditional music and dance group and the Ebanguliro Afrikan Spiritual Choir. A national office is located in Kampala, the capital of Uganda.

For more information visit: http://www.inclusion.com/resmpambo.html or
http://www.blackherbals.com/Mpambo_the_African_Multiversity.htm

Dr. Coll Thrush (History UBC) gives a talk in the ANSO 205 this Thursday on:

Becoming Aboriginal: The Secret History of the Potato on the Northwest Coast, 1770-1850

In 1825, French gastronome Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” His statement came at a time when ideas about the connections between people and their environments were hardening into hierarchies that linked race to nature, and the apparent equation between food and culture was part of this development. However, on the Northwest Coast of North America, a historical process was underway which challenged European notions of culinary determinism. Beginning the 1770s, the Coast Salish, Nuu-chah-nulth, and other aboriginal peoples of the Northwest Coast actively incorporated an introduced food, the potato, into their traditional food systems. By the 1850s, when permanent settlement by Europeans began in earnest, the potato had become a central part of the foodways of many Northwest Coast peoples, to the extent that in some cases their gardens made the newcomers survival possible. In conflictsover land and through attempts at civilizing Indians through forced agriculture, however, this tradition would largely be forgotten. In examining the cultural and environmental history of the potato on the Northwest Coast including modern-day efforts to revive the nearly-extinct indigenous cultivars of the region, this paper challenges Brillat-Savarin’s persistent notion that food, culture, race, and place are static concepts with clearly-defined boundaries. Drawing on oral tradition, archaeological data, phylogenetic studies, and archival materials, the paper suggests a path toward a complex, dynamic approach bringing food history and aboriginal history into conversation with each other.

When: Thursday, March 29, 2007at 11:30.
Where: ANSO 205

For a list of Dr. Thrush’s research and publications, please see his home page on the History Department website.