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.

This Saturday, the two departments that are home to archaeology at UBC (Anthropology and Classics, Near Eastern and Religious Studies) come together to hear about each other’s work. This is the 2nd annual day of presentations, posters and conversations involving archaeology students from UBC programs as well as friends and colleagues from the Vancouver area.

When: Saturday, March 24, 2007 from 8:30am-5:00pm
Where: ANSO 205/207 (show me a map)

See the poster for this session here.

A reminder about the Dorothy Thompson Memorial Lecture tomorrow by Professor Colin Renfrew, Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn on:

The Indo-European Problem and the Origins of Linguistic Diversity

Lecture Abstract: “The Indo-European language family is one of the largest in the world in terms both of speakers and the great expanse of territory in which they live. The explanation for this large distribution takes one back to prehistoric times and poses archaeological problems which remain unresolved. In this lecture, the traditional view that the proto Indo-European language was dispersed through most of Europe by mounted warrior nomads from the steppe lands north of the Black Sea, at the beginning of the Bronze Age, is called into question. The alternative view that proto Indo-European speakers accompanied the spread of farming from Anatolia, the modern Turkey, some 3,000 years earlier is instead proposed. This is a specific case of the farming/language dispersal model which is of wider relevance. Current controversies concerning the origins of linguistic diversity will be reviewed.”

Thursday, March 15, 2007, 3:30 p.m.
Leonard S. Klinck (LSK) Building, Room 201

Lord Renfrew is an internationally renowned archaeologist. Among his many books, perhaps best known are his The Emergence of Civilisation (1972), Before Civilisation: the Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe (1973), Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo- European Origins (1987) , and Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice (with P. Bahn), the textbook for Anth 305.

The Center for India and South Asia Research is delighted to announce that Akhil Gupta, prominent anthropologist of development, modernity, and postcolonial South Asia, will be speaking here at UBC this week on the topic of:

“Literacy and Democracy: Notes from Anthropological Observations in Rural India”

Thursday, March 15, 2007, 11:30 – 1 PM
Room 120, C.K. Choi Building (1855 West Mall)

Akhil Gupta is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Red Tape: Corruption, Inscription and Governmentality in Rural India (forthcoming, Duke), and Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Duke, 1998), and has edited The Anthropology of the State (Blackwell, 2006), Caste and Outcast (2002), Culture, Power, Place (1997), and Anthropological Locations (1997).

Dr. Kelly Bannister (Director, POLIS Project on Ecological Governance, U Victoria) gives a talk in the ANSO building this Thursday on:

The Nexus of Biodiversity and Traditional Knowledge

The role of traditional knowledge in biodiversity science and decision-making has peaked serious interest by governments, policy-makers, academics, Indigenous communities and others around the world. However, despite increasing agreement in principle that combining western scientific and traditional knowledge systems may better address some emergent human and ecosystem health problems, relatively little progress has been made in practice or in developing policies and infrastructure to support such practice. The role of ethical and quasi-legal instruments, such as research protocols and codes, are receiving significant attention at local to international levels for their potential to address a number of challenges that lie at this nexus of principle-policy-practice involving biodiversity and traditional knowledge. Are such instruments tools for building cross-cultural relationships, democratizing biodiversity science and empowering communities in decision-making, or do they serve to bureaucratize the research enterprise?

Thursday, March 8 2007 – 5:00 – 6:30 pm in ANSO 2107.

Forests and Oceans for the Future Speakers Series