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 and Culture.

December 5, 2024

Harriet Ottenheimer and Martin Ottenheimer

Talk Summary: In this presentation we review nearly 60 years of field research and interaction with the Comoro Islands, located in the Mozambique Channel, an arm of the Indian Ocean, and in particular, with the people of Domoni, on the island of Anjouan.

We became residents of Domoni in the 1960s, when the Comoros were still a French colony, and have maintained connections ever since. We brought our young sons to the Comoros, brought Comorian friends to the U.S., sponsored a Comorian student at our university, and co-parented at a traditional wedding. We were granted  Comorian citizenship in 2011 and we serve on Domoni’s heritage committee. In this presentation, we will review and discuss some of the changes we have observed, some of the ways that we have participated in ongoing traditions, and some of the ways we have been privileged to “give back” to our hosts. We also raise the complex issues surrounding how–and how much–anthropologists should consider local requests for help with initiating changes as well as with documenting traditions.

Residents of the town of Domoni have participated actively in Indian Ocean trading networks since the 5^th century, sailing to Indian ports and welcoming traders and settlers from India. Domoni was also an important reprovisioning stop for American whaling ships during the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Although the Indian Ocean trade was halted by colonization,  many of the cultural elements supporting the trade, such as matrifocal polygyny, continue to this day.

Bios: Harriet & Martin Ottenheimer are emeriti professors of Anthropology at Kansas State University where Martin served as department head and Harriet as founding director of American Ethnic Studies.  Both are Fulbright scholars. They received their Ph.D.s in Anthropology from Tulane U, with undergraduate backgrounds in Engineering and Philosophy (Martin, RPI) and in Music and Literature (Harriet, Bennington). Martin’s research areas include Theory, Kinship, and Culture. Harriet’s research areas include Ethnomusicology, Linguistics, and Expressive Culture.

Focusing on marriage patterns, religious systems, and seafaring traditions, Martin completed his dissertation fieldwork in the Comoro Islands. His publications include Marriage in Domoni: Husbands and Wives in an Indian Ocean Community(Waveland), Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth of Cousin Marriage in the U.S. (U Illinois), and, with Richard Feinberg, The Cultural Analysis of Kinship (U Illinois).

Focusing on blues performance practices and life-story narratives, Harriet completed her dissertation field work in New Orleans. She then accompanied Martin to the Comoros where she documented music, language, and culinary practices. Her publications include Cousin Joe: Blues from New Orleans (U Chicago), two editions of Comorian-English/English-Comorian (ShiNzwani) Dictionary (Ag), four editions of The Anthropology of Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (Cengage), and, with Maurice Martinez, The Quorum (documentary, Such-A-Much/Doorknob).

Together they have published Music of the Comoro Islands: Domoni (Folkways/Smithsonian) and Historical Dictionary of the Comoro Islands (Scarecrow). In 1974 their sons, Afan and Davi, helped them to learn ShiNtiri, the secret children’s language of Domoni.

https://youtu.be/oN-vCbHvBMg

September 19, 2024

Suzanne Hanchett

Talk Summary: Discussing her 56-year journey from anthro major and grad student, to assistant professor, to practicing and applied anthropologist, Suzanne Hanchett will share her thoughts about the ways that her background in anthropology turned out to be useful outside of academia.  Her practicing and applied work has included grant-writing for two large non-profits, high-level positions in New York City government on foster care and adolescent pregnancy, and 25 years as an international development consultant to organizations such as CARE, UNICEF, WHO, the World Bank, and WaterAid UK, with a focus on women’s participation, access to safe water, and promoting adequate sanitation. Program evaluation jobs and other assignments have entailed complex combinations of quantitative and qualitative data. Practicing and applied jobs also have required significant collaboration with social workers, engineers, and professionals with other backgrounds. She will discuss her thoughts about the ways that academic life discourages such collaboration. Another issue addressed in her talk is how non-academic researchers and writers can pursue scholarly projects without support from academic institutions. Suzanne has regularly published articles about her applied work and formed a strong connection with the University of Sussex, Institute of Development Studies, Sanitation Learning Hub. She attends AAA and SfAA conferences regularly, but finds American academics less interested in the work of applied/practicing anthropologists than those in some other countries. Her scholarly interests continue today, and she has formed her own publishing company – Development Resources Press — publishing three books of her own (based on 1969s fieldwork and applied work in Bangladesh) and editing two others. Suzanne also will share her thoughts about how some exposure to non-academic anthropologists could enhance students’ ability to understand how their educational background might be of use in multiple kinds of careers.

Bio: Dr. Sazanne Hanchett is a social/cultural anthropologist. She did her dissertation research in Karnataka State, India, and taught for 10 years at Queens College (City University of New York), Bard College, and Barnard College. From 1979 to 1991 she worked as a practicing anthropologist, focusing on community development, reproductive health, teen pregnancy, and child welfare in New York City. Since 1991 she has worked as an applied anthropologist in international development, mainly in Bangladesh, on gender and development, and on water and sanitation issues as a consultant to organizations such as UNICEF, CARE, WaterAid, and others. She has written a number of articles for peer-reviewed journals, and she is the author of three self-published books based on her work in India and Bangladesh (devresbooks.com). Dr. Hanchett is a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology, President of the International Women’s Anthropology Conference (IWAC) and a Partner in the consulting company, Planning Alternatives for Change LLC (planningalternatives.com).

May 9, 2024

Meredeth A. B. Ellis

Talk summary: In this talk, I will share the results of the bioarchaeological investigation into the early 19th century Spring Street Presbyterian Church in Lower Manhattan. In particular this talk will focus on the children (<15 years of age) in the commingled skeletal collection (MNI = 70) that was accidentally unearthed in 2006. This talk will focus on trends in diseases, including rickets, scurvy, and endocranial lesions, as well as social ideology around children and health in 19th century New York City. This will be done by focusing on understanding children within socially relevant age categories. The combination of skeletal data and historic records allows for a specific commentary on differing social relationships, and therefore embodied skeletal markers, experienced by children of different ages. This data can help us understand larger social dynamics in the rapidly urbanizing space of the 8th Ward of Manhattan.

Bio: Meredith A.B. Ellis is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Florida Atlantic University, and the Interim Director of the College of Arts and Letters Doctoral Program in Comparative Studies.  She holds MA degrees in English (University of Rochester) and Anthropology (Syracuse University) and a PhD in Anthropology from Syracuse University.  Her research focus is on bioarchaeology of the 19^th and 20^th centuries in the United States, with a particular focus on childhood, race, and social theory.  She is the author of the monograph:  The Children of Spring Street: The Bioarchaeology of Childhood in a 19th Century Abolitionist Congregation and the coeditor of Nineteenth Century Childhoods in Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives, with Jane Eva Baxter.  Her current work explores the theoretical underpinnings of bioarchaeological identity making through the study of two skeletons from the 1928 Hurricane in Belle Glade, Florida.

Dr. Sidney Greenfield

Talk Summary: In this presentation I review the events in my career that happened prior to my beginning to study Kardecist Spiritist surgeries and healing in 1981. After showing examples of patients being cut into, reporting feeling no pain and recovering, I discuss my efforts to learn the emic explanation for the healings and then to find an etic or scientific explanation. The crux of the paper, however, is why I felt it necessary to seek a scientific explanation. Following on Marshall Sahlin’s questioning of anthropology’s need to replace the explanations of their behavior given by the people we study with scientific ones from our own culture, I ask is why I felt I needed to find a biomedical explanation for the behaviors I observed rather than accepting the one my teachers of Kardecism gave me. The argument leads me to conclude by apologizing to them.

Bio: Sid Greenfield is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Co-chair of the Columbia University Seminars on Brazil, Studies in Religion and Contents and Methods in the Social Sciences. He is past president of the Association of Senior Anthropologists, the Association for the Anthropology of Consciousness and past vice-president of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. He has conducted ethnographic research in Barbados and New Bedford, Massachusetts, but mostly in Brazil, and ethnohistorical and historical research in Portugal and the Atlantic Islands on problems ranging from family and kinship, patronage and politics, the history of plantations and plantation slavery and entrepreneurship to Spiritist surgery and healing, syncretized Brazilian religions such as Candomblé, Umbanda, and Kardecist Spiritism, and Evangelical Protestants in Brazilian politics. He is author and/or editor of nine books, producer, director and author of five video documentaries, and has published some 150 articles and reviews in books and professional journals.

Jim Weil

Talk Summary: An alternative title might be posed as a question: Can Memoir Writing Be a Distinctive Project of the Association of Senior Anthropologists? The presentation begins with reference to several inspirational anthropological memoirists. This serves as a background for proposing autoethnohistory as kind of memoir falling between autobiography and autoethnography. Early formative influences are distinguished from professional training and ongoing life experiences in the shaping and channeling of careers. Assessments of “degrees of belonging” demonstrate the relevance of reflexivity for comparisons of otherwise unique professional identities. Past ASA contributions to the living history of the discipline are reviewed as preliminary forays into memoir writing (Weil 2019). Jim’s own efforts at “compiling fragments of a memoir” illustrate additional variations in the forms and styles of presentation (Weil 2023a, Weil 2023b). In the ensuing discussion, colleagues are invited to give examples from their own lives and, as the case may be, their own writing.

Bio: Following his childhood in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Jim completed undergraduate studies at UC-Berkeley with a generalist social science major. He worked in a rural health development program as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand and earned an MPH degree at the University of Hawaii. He served as associate director of the Waikiki Drug Clinic before plunging into doctoral studies emphasizing human ecology and political economy in the Columbia University anthropology department. Research in Bolivia and Costa Rica focused his interests in the anthropology of work and its manifestations in material culture and expressive culture, also raising issues of personal engagement in the field (see Weil 2020). While temporary and adjunct positions prevailed in his teaching career, Jim’s affiliation as a research associate at the Science Museum of Minnesota continues.

Rena Lederman

February 29, 2024

My ASA Chat excerpts and summarizes my contribution to the November 2023 American Ethnologist Forum, “What’s the good of anthropology?”.  For the paper in full, see: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/amet.13229.

That paper concerns a dilemma faced in practicum courses and in helping students represent anthropology’s distinctive research style to research ethics committees mostly comprising mainstream social-behavioral scientists. In my experience, the quality of anthropological research that attracts students is its realism—its rooting in anthropologists’ sustained relationships with persons and circumstances wherever they actually are. Students are captivated by the possibility of engaging in meaningful ways with people whose experience moves them. However, from a conventional social-behavioral science perspective, being with and learning from people on the latter’s terms and in conditions not controlled by the researchers, is incoherent as science (and, in that sense, unprofessional and unethical). Dominant social-behavioral research styles sacrifice realism for replicability by creating special-purpose settings to enable systematic hypothesis-testing and reproducible findings. Realism is also devalued in research ethics reviews, which treat replicability (not realism) as the social-behavioral research standard. 

            My references to “mainstream” and “conventional” social and behavioral science rest on field research of a different kind from the work I carried out in Papua New Guinea in the late 1970s–early 1990s.  While the first couple of decades of my research career were devoted to Melanesianist field research and teaching, I have spent a larger fraction of the past three decades reflecting comparatively on anthropological research values and practices in relation to those of our disciplinary neighbors in the humanities and social/behavioral sciences. Much of that reflection was accomplished as a university and disciplinary citizen serving on committees and other bodies as the only anthropologist among experts in those neighboring disciplines. In addition to reading published and unpublished sources of various kinds, my comparative disciplinary understanding derives from practical, engaged experience serving on those bodies—including post-doctoral fellowship committees, an IRB, various funding agency subcommittees, national-level commissions evaluating research ethics oversight practices themselves, and more.  

Rena Lederman (PhD Columbia; Professor, Princeton): At Princeton, Dr. Lederman administered the department’s undergraduate program (especially 1980s); she was on the board and executive committee of the Program in Women’s (then Gender and Sexuality) Studies (1980s-2000s), served as Anthropology’s Director of Graduate Studies and was her department’s representative on the university’s Institutional Review Board for a total of 16 years, among other service responsibilities.  Dr. Lederman began her scholarly career as a student of Melanesian exchange meanings and practices, gender relations and politics, and historical dynamics and discourses—drawn to Highland Papua New Guinea for its decentralized, participatory political culture; and to anthropological scholarship on PNG and the Pacific as resources for rethinking EuroAmerican assumptions about sociality and about “cultures” as bounded, ahistorical, and shared. Pacific perspectives on cultural boundaries, differences, and transformations continued to inform her thinking as her work shifted during the 1990s and into the 2000s to engage controversy within and beyond anthropology over the public reception of disciplinary expertises. Around 2000 her emergent comparative understanding of disciplinary knowledges became a means for intervening in national and international policy discourse on human research regulation. Much of her time over the past 25 years has been spent intervening in practical and scholarly ways to respond to the panic prompted by international regulatory “hypervigilance” that appeared to threaten ethnographic research disproportionately. Once fully retired in 2024, she plans to return to delayed projects central to her scholarship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkRdpMfyx5s&authuser=0

Robert Rubenstein

January 18, 2024

In this talk I reflect on the role of relationships in the field. I mean this in two senses, (1) the professional and personal relationships that we form with colleagues; and (2) the roles played by relationships we form with people among whom we do fieldwork, and how these intersect. Both forms of relationship influence the shape of the discipline and contribute to defining the topics of our research. Regarding the first, in this talk I reflect on how a chance introduction to Sol Tax contributed to my own anthropological practice. I met Sol half a dozen years after completing my doctorate. Completed at the end of 1976, my doctoral studies focused on Mesoamerica, language and education, and on the philosophy of science.  Before meeting Sol, I had read Robert Redfield’s papers in the University of Chicago Special Collections. Among those papers I found fascinating the relationship between Robert Redfield and Tax. I discuss what led me to the 1991 publication of Fieldwork: The Correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax, which compiles and annotates some of the letters they exchanged during their Guatemalan fieldwork. I describe the archival work that led to the publication and the ways in which referees reacted to the book proposal. Working further with Sol, I found Action Anthropology to be a good case to work with as I sought to replicate research done by Don Campbell on the role of relationships and personality in the founding of schools in psychology, which I discuss. As well, Sol’s leadership in the IUAES led to an introduction to Mary LeCron Foster, from which developed a 20 year-long collaboration on the anthropology of peace and human rights. I describe the way this led to the founding of the IUAES Commission on Peace and Human Rights, and to my subsequent work on the anthropology of multilateral peacekeeping.  Regarding the ways in which relationships with people among whom we do our fieldwork, in this talk I discuss how the reciprocal obligations of field work with multilateral peacekeeping forces led to my working with the United States Army Peacekeeping Institute and the United Nations. The former somewhat paradoxical given my own biography in relation to the US war in Vietnam. Subsequently, this led back to the discipline because, despite peacekeeping being exempted from the list of ‘anthropological sins’ articulated by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, I was among those described as war criminals at the business meeting of the 2007 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

Robert A. Rubinstein is currently Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Professor of International Relations at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. His research focuses on political and medical anthropology and on social science history and research methods. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1977. He received a master’s degree in public health from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 1983.From 1994 to 2005 Rubinstein directed the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts at the Maxwell School.Rubinstein has conducted overseas research in urban and rural Egypt, where he lived from 1988-1992, and in Belize and Mexico. In the United States, he has conducted research in Atlanta, Chicago, and Syracuse. In political anthropology, Rubinstein’s work focuses on cross-cultural aspects of conflict and dispute resolution, including negotiation, mediation and consensus building. He is an originator of the subfield now referred to as the  anthropology of peacekeeping. In 1983, Rubinstein was a founding member of the Commission on Peace and Human Rights of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences.  Rubinstein has collaborated on policy applications of his work with the International Peace Academy, the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, The United Nation Office of Internal Oversight Services, and the United States Army Peacekeeping Institute. As a medical anthropologist, Rubinstein has focused on conflict and health, disparities in access to health care and the implications of those disparities for the health of populations, and on the integration of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. He has developed community-based health interventions in Egypt and Atlanta. And additionally, he has collaborated on health policy issues with the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Carter Center, the Georgia Department of Physical Health, and the Onondaga County Health Department. Robert Rubinstein has published more than 100 articles in journals and books. He is author or editor of ten books and research monographs.  Among the many honors he has received are the 2016 Victor Sidel and Barry Levy Award for Peace from the American Public Health Association, the 2010 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association, and the Chancellor’s Citation for Faculty Excellence and Scholarly Distinction from Syracuse University.

https://youtu.be/WMkfsOwedV0

December 7, 2023

Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori