Thursday, May 15, 2025

Sara A. Smith – State University of New York, Old Westbury

Talk Summary:

In this talk, Dr. Sarah Smith situates public health and health care in the context of U.S. imperialism, benign neglect, gender inequality, and transnational migration, particularly in the US Affiliated Pacific Islands. After discussing how her training and research in both applied anthropology and public health led her to current research projects, Dr. Smith illustrates key issues and facets of her research with the situation of the women from Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia who migrate to Guåhan (Guam), a US territory, and suffer from disproportionately poor reproductive health outcomes. Though their access to the US is uniquely easy, through a Compact of Free Association agreement, it keeps them in a perpetual liminal state as nonimmigrants, who never fully belong as part of the US. Chuukese families move to Guåhan in search of a better life: sometimes for jobs, to put their children in school, or to access safe health care. Yet, the imperial system of benign neglect creates underlying conditions that greatly and disproportionately impact Chuukese migrants’ ability to succeed, including inequities in education, health, and job skills. In this talk, she illuminates how imperial citizenship, migration, xenophobia, gender inequities, and poverty intersect, cohere and compound to shape the poor reproductive health outcomes of Chuukese women in Guåhan. To better understand why Chuukese women suffer these health inequities, she elucidates how Chuukese women’s reproduction is conceptualized by women, their families, and home and host communities, and how these meanings are mediated by US imperialism and transnational migration between Chuuk and Guam. Her work in Guam brought her to a better understanding of the intersection of the control and movement of bodies (structural violence), representations of bodies in society (symbolic violence), and individual experiences and agency in these transnational spaces.

Bio:

Sarah A. Smith is chair and associate professor of public health and director of the health equity research institute at the State University of New York (SUNY) Old Westbury. She earned a PhD in applied anthropology and a master of public health from the University of South Florida. She has published research on migration, identity, and exclusion; sexual violence and human trafficking; stratified reproduction; women’s organizations; and clinical environments. Smith is a feminist medical anthropologist; her work connects health and health care in contexts of imperialism, neglect, gender inequality, and migration, particularly in the US Affiliated Pacific Islands. Rutgers University Press recently published her book, Forgotten Bodies: Imperialism, Chuukese Migration and Stratified Reproduction in Guam (2023).

Zoom link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEkhUHTccnY&t=5s&ab_channel=TimWallace

April 17, 2025

Kathleen (Kathy) Fine-Dare, Ft. Lewis College – Durango, CO

Talk Summary: 

The US Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) became law nearly 35 years ago, and yet many institutions have not returned First Nations’ Ancestral human remains and belongings to descendant communities. Sociocultural anthropologist and NAGPRA practitioner/scholar Kathy Fine-Dare will make this complex law accessible by weaving together accomplishments she has seen and worked with over nearly four decades and at least three sets of federal regulations; the role of communities of practice in disseminating information throughout what once were silos of underappreciated and silenced work; influences the law has had throughout the US beyond federally recognized Native nations as well as across the globe; and challenges that remain in seeking restorative justice with an ethos of irreconciliation. She is interested in discussing ways that the passage of NAGPRA parallels some of the late 20^th and early 21^st century critiques of anthropology and the opening of the discipline throughout its subfields to cautiously optimistic while simultaneously critical views of anthropology.

Bio:

Kathleen (Kathy) Fine-Dare is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Gender/Women’s Studies at Fort Lewis College (FLC) in Durango, Colorado. Her degrees are from DePauw University (BA) and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (MA, PhD). At FLC she twice served as anthropology department chair, as coordinator of the gender/women’s studies program, and as a faculty affiliate of the program in Native American and Indigenous Studies. In 2005 she taught in the Anthropology and Culture MA program of the Salesian Polytechnic University in Quito, Ecuador, with a Fulbright grant. Until 2021 she was FLC’s NAGPRA compliance officer and co-PI of FLC’s second national NAGPRA grant, as she was its first. She has published several articles, book chapters, and books, including Dinámicas de la indigeneidad en contextos urbanos (Quito: USFQ Press and Abya-Yala 2025); Urban Mountain Beings: History, Indigeneity, and Geographies of Time in Quito, Ecuador (Lexington 2020); The Andean World (Routledge 2019, co-edited/authored with L.J. Seligmann); Border Crossings: Transnational Americanist Anthropology (Nebraska 2009, co-edited/authored with S.L. Rubenstein); and Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA (Nebraska 2002, under revision). Kathy is currently secretary of the Association of Senior Anthropologists (AAA) and serves on the speakers committee of the national NAGPRA Community of Practice. She is a board member of the Colorado Fulbright Association and President of the governing board of the Mesa Verde Museum Association. Kathy lives in Durango with her husband, FLC Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Dr. Byron Dare.

Zoom link:

March 13, 2025

Dr. Anthony (Tony) Seeger

Talk Summary:

Music can change people’s lives. In fact, it can change them several times. Music played around the house during childhood may give way to the discovery of something quite different in grade school and college after exposure during a concert, listening to a recording, or a class assignment. Most people I have talked with remember vividly at least one experience with music. Some of them became devoted fans, others learned to perform on musical instruments, some became professional musicians and some became anthropologists or ethnomusicologists who study music.

Only a few anthropologists have focused their research on music and dance.  From our publications it would appear that most of us are deaf to melody, unmoved by dance, unaware of aromas, and very dependent on using language for our research. But I know most anthropologists have been deeply moved by their own musical experiences. Many play musical instruments and are good dancers. In the late 1960s and early 1970s my dissertation advisors, Victor Turner and Terence Turner, were notable for their musical and dance contributions to parties as the evenings grew late—Vic with his enthusiastic dancing and Terry with his seemingly endless supply of raunchy rugby songs.

How does an anthropologist change people’s lives through music? I will discuss how I used my training as an anthropologist to run an audiovisual archive, The Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music, and a record company, Folkways Records after it was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution. I will outline how my training in anthropology shaped my approach to running both of them, and what I tried to do to help people change their lives, and their thinking. Both of these endeavors  could be called “applied anthropology (or ethnomusicology)” because they were public facing and policy related. But they influenced my thinking as well—many of my articles and book chapters have been “forged in the crucible of action” where the doing shaped my subsequent thinking.

Presenter Bio:

I was born into a musical family whose lives were profoundly affected by the right wing “red scare” in the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. My musicologist grandfather had his passport cancelled and had to retire from his job at the Pan American Union. My uncle Pete was investigated by HUAC and convicted of contempt of Congress (a feeling now shared by many). Several other members of my family were investigated as well and their lives changed. Singing with my parents since I could talk and playing the banjo at age 12, I was deeply aware that music had power to frighten authorities, and that being a musician could be dangerous.  It was also personally satisfying—in 8^th grade I had a 4^th-grade fan club whose members squealed when I performed at school assemblies. I suspect my musical abilities influenced the jobs I have been offered during my career. As an undergraduate at Harvard, I opted to study Social Relations to learn what it was about music that made it so powerful and so dangerous. I also studied folklore under Albert Lord. But for graduate school I thought the questions anthropologists asked were more interesting than those of folklorists. I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in 1974. My most popular book is Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People (Cambridge 1987 with audio cassette; U. Illinois Press 2024 revised and expanded, with CD, with translations into Chinese and Portuguese.

I taught at Pomona College (1974-5) and in the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro (1975-82). In 1982 I accepted a position in the Anthropology Department Indiana University and was asked by the Dean of the Arts and Sciences to serve as Director of the Archives of Traditional Music. This began my career as an audiovisual archivist.  In 1988 I was invited to become the first curator and director of the Folkways Records Collection at what is now called the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. In 2000, thinking it was time for new leadership, I accepted a position as Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. My plans for research at UCLA were sidelined by accepting the position of Secretary General of the International Council for Traditional Music, an NGO affiliated with UNESCO, during the development of a new “instrument” for Intangible Cultural Heritage. I made many more trips to Paris than to the field in Brazil.

As I approach 80, I find I have written three books on the Suyá, now calling themselves Kĩsêdjê, an Indigenous people living in Mato Grosso, Brazil, co-edited three others on audiovisual issues, and published over 140 articles and book chapters on anthropological, ethnomusicological, archival, intellectual property, and Indigenous rights issues. (List of publications: https://www.academia.edu/72475584/List_of_Publications_by_Anthony_Seeger)            I am the executive producer of over 250 CDs and  producer of radio shows, a 30-video cassette set, and an instructional DVD. My voice and banjo skills are fading, but I continue to perform with my wife, Judy.

Zoom Link:

February 20, 2025

Sabra J. Webber

In the early 1890s Fletcher Basset, representing the Chicago Folklore Society, was planning an international folklore conference as an adjunct to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. But the Chicago Folklore Society, unlike most folklore societies of the time, favored a literary, rather than an anthropological approach to folklore. Thus, William Wells Newell and Franz Boas each representing anthropology and the American Folklore Society intervened stating that the scientific credibility of folklore studies would be threatened by this association with literature. Yet at possibly contrastive moments over the history of anthropological or folkloristic fields scholars considered it laudatory to interweave theoretical or methodological practices from various disciplines. This disposition was practical in light of the necessary awkwardness of disciplinary labels. Not long after the end of the Chicago World’s Fair, we find Boas’ obituary for his friend and colleague Newell praising him for his “literary inclinations,” by means of which he “came to be a power in the field of anthropology …enabling him to see that the gulf between the mental life of primitive man and civilized man…that many students had constructed, had no existence in reality.” Boas continued, “to understand him aright, we must also not forget the broad humanitarian basis of his scientific interests.”  After briefly elaborating on my abstract above and my particular scholarly foci, I will take the greater part of the chat to draw from my own and others’ methods and theories for gaining insight after returning from field experiences/studies. These may build on or appropriate the work of scholars or artists from various specialties. After I throw out some examples, I would be pleased if my colleagues would share examples from their own work

Thursday, January 23, 2025 – 3:00 pm Eastern Standard Time

Zoom Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQS7E888vO8&ab_channel=TimWallace

Dr. Carter A. Hunt (Penn State) and Dr. Tim Wallace (North Carolina State)

Talk Summary:

Carter Hunt and Tim Wallace discuss the importance of tourism  and heritage as a topic of research by anthropologists in the context of the history of Valene Smith’s role in bringing this vital field to the attention of socio-cultural anthropologists. Dr. Smith passed in 2024 at the age of 98. Arising from a symposium honoring Smith’s contributions to the anthropology of tourism in Tampa at the AAA’s, Hunt and Wallace discuss why tourism is a key topic of research for anthropologists and Smith’s role in making that happen.

Carter Hunt’s focus is on the role of Dr. Smith’s contributions in laying the foundation for the explosive growth in ecotourism and sustainable tourism scholarship seen from the late 1980s onward. In her writing, Smith identified the need to distinguish the impacts of tourism from other ongoing processes of colonization, globalization, extraction, and market integration that affect communities and their environments. Amid efforts to promote understanding of these distinctions, Smith called for “full cost accounting” of social and environmental consequences of tourism that brought attention to questions of “who benefits and who pays?” In calling for governmental discourse to catch up with grassroots activism, and the development of tourism policies that can be monitored, Smith anticipated strengthening of resource management institutions as a key benefit of ecotourism.

Tim Wallace’s part of the Chat discusses Smith’s contribution to the anthropology of tourism as seen from the perspective of applied anthropology. Valene Smith was one of the first to recognize anthropologists’ lens for studies was out of focus when it came to tourists and tourism, hence her call for papers at the 1974 Mexico AAA conference. Valene had long been an active observer of how tourism affects and could affect local communities. She is one of the few anthropologists who actually owned a travel agency. She even owned and flew her own airplane. As early as the mid 1950’s she led large group study tours to far flung places around the globe which deepened her understanding of the role of tourism relating to both hosts and guests, as she called them. Dr. Wallace traces Smith’s connection not only to advocacy of the study of tourism by applied anthropologists but also to her emphasis on encouraging both
colleagues and students to use tourism for good.

Bios:

Carter Hunt is an Associate Professor of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management, and Anthropology at Penn State University. He is the Director of the PSU Dual-title Graduate Program in Transdisciplinary Research on Environment and Society (TREES) and the Intercollegiate Minor in Sustainability Leadership. He is also the director of an NSF-supported project entitled Cultura en Camino in the Galapagos Islands. His primary research interests lie at the intersections of environmental anthropology, political ecology, and the anthropology of tourism in biodiverse regions of Latin America. He and his students tend to utilize ethnographic methods to conduct field research on the impact of tourism on conservation, sustainable community development, and rural livelihoods around parks and protected areas. He also leverages an interest in conservation psychology to research the ways that different forms of nature-based travel influence one’s subsequent pro-environmental behavior, including
conservation-oriented travel philanthropy. His research has taken him to Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Peru, and Tanzania. He has published in outlets that include the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, Journal of Ecotourism, Human Organization, World Development Sustainability, and Annual Reviews of Environment and Resources. https://sites.psu.edu/carterahunt/

Tim Wallace is an associate professor emeritus and an applied, cultural anthropologist at North  Carolina State Univ ersity. He is a Past President of the Association of Senior Anthropologists and he also served as President of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (2011-2013), and a former editor of the NAPA Bulletin. He also was a board member of the Society for Applied Anthropology and is a founding member of the SfAA Tourism and Heritage TIG. His research areas are tourism and heritage and community development with fieldwork in Central and South America, East Africa, Central Europe, Japan and North Carolina. He organized and led 25 seasons of an ethnographic field school in Hungary, Costa Rica and Guatemala. He retired from NC State in 2019 after 45 years of service. He continues to teach an online course at NCSU entitled Language