Preview attachment Sid Greenfield ASA Thursday Chat May 2023.mp4

May 4, 2023

Sid Greenfield

This chat summarizes the series of fortunate accidents that led the son of two High School dropouts, who almost became one himself, to get a PhD in anthropology. This, and a tenured position at a young age, led to a research career that took him from studying the family in Barbados to Brazil, where his research into patronage overlapped with Political Science. He did history when he went to Portugal to unravel the origins of plantations and plantation slavery. Returning to Brazil, he delved into medicine when he entered the enchanted world of healing in Northeast Brazil where beings we place in another plane of reality return to our world through mediums to perform milagres (“miracles”) such as surgeries in which they cut into patients with anything from a surgical scalpel to a rusty knife to an electric saw without anesthesia or antisepsis. The patients feel no pain, do not develop infections, and recover. Finally, as age and infirmity took hold, in collaboration with colleagues, he is helping improve the mental health of women in a favela (slum) in Fortaleza and working with local people to raise their own food.

Moshe Shokeid ASA Thursday Chat March 2023.mp4 – Google Drive

March 16, 2023

Moshe Shokeid

Only a minority among our colleagues enjoy the opportunity to revisit their earlier fieldwork sites, reviewing their initial observations and research conclusions. This paper presents my experience witnessing the dramatic social transformations that have taken place owing to internal and external processes, in three fieldwork sites over twenty to thirty years. The subjects of these ethnographic monographs : Moroccan Jewish immigrants in an Israeli farming community; Israeli emigrants in the Borough of Queens; the gay and lesbian synagogue in New York City. These evolutionary changes, unconceivable during the studied period but inevitable aftereffects of most ethnographic projects, present a reality that anthropologists rarely consider in their work and teaching.

Carole McGranahan Theory as Ethics ASA Thursday Chat 02_16_23.mp4 – Google Drive

February 16, 2023

Carole McGranahan

To theorize is to make an argument, to make sense of the world, to name and create. It is to stake a claim in and about the world. This can be an ethical act. However, it has not always been one. Thinking of theory as ethics, rather than solely as intellectual practice, requires a rethinking of the purpose and not just the content of theory. This is not a prescription for theory, but an acknowledgment of a shift underway across the disciplines. In anthropology, one key move is our recognition of ethnography as theory as well as method. As we reassess theory as a form of ethnographic knowledge, how and when do ethics enter the conversation? What are our responsibilities to speak not only truth to power, but also ethics to theory? In this talk, I explore these questions through (1) my own three decades of research with the Tibetan exile diaspora, and (2) current theoretical trends in anthropology.

Carole McGranahan is Professor in and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan (2001). Dr. McGranahan is a scholar of contemporary Tibet and the USA and conducts research with the Tibetan exile community in both South Asia and North America. She is author of Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (Duke University Press, 2010), co-editor of Imperial Formations (with Ann Stoler and Peter Perdue, SAR Press, 2007) and Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (with John Collins, Duke University Press, 2018), and editor of Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (Duke University Press, 2020). She is currently finishing a book on Theoretical Storytelling.

Harvard Chiapas Project Thursday Chat by Matt Watson.mp4 – Google Drive

January 26, 2023

Matthew C. Watson

Between 1957 and 1980, 142 students conducted ethnography in Mexico through the Harvard Chiapas Project. One-third of them became professional anthropologists. Project alumni include scholars of Mesoamerica as well as experts on regions around the world, where they extended methods developed to study Zinacantán, a Chiapas municipality of 8,000 residents, to cultural study writ large. They have built high-impact research centers and trained generations of anthropologists in methods learned in the Chiapas highlands. The Chiapas Project’s impact on the humanities and social sciences is immeasurable. Yet this major project and field school has figured only peripherally in histories of anthropology. This talk develops current efforts to rewrite anthropology’s history by tracing the pedagogical, technological, and experiential conditions of ethnographic training and fieldwork. I center two technological conditions of fieldwork in Chiapas from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s: the use of a Land-Rover as a vehicle enabling and framing ethnographic interviews; and the novel incorporation of aerial photography as a workaround for generating ethnographic data under conditions of compromised rapport.

Matthew C. Watson is an associate professor of anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. His work on the history of anthropology has focused centrally on twentieth-century Maya studies as a site of popular science with deep political and economic consequences in Mexico and Central America. His book, Afterlives of Affect: Science, Religion, and an Edgewalker’s Spirit (Duke University Press, 2020) evokes how surrealist artist and art historian Linda Schele imbued a space of banal historical research, Maya hieroglyphic decipherment, with an aura of joyous revelation. His recent work turns to the history of midcentury ethnography in highland Chiapas, centering techniques and technologies of ethnographic fieldwork and pedagogy developed through the Harvard Chiapas Project (1957-1980).

ASA Thursday Chat 12_8_22 ASA at the AAAs of the Future.mp4 – Google Drive

December 8, 2022

Welcome from Maria Cattell.

There were both good things and difficulties with the 2022 meeting.  In the Thursday chat we want to hear your ideas about how we on the ASA Board can make improvements for future years. Several board members will help to guide the discussion and keep us on track. Among them are: Jim Weil, Rick Feinberg, Jay Schensul, Tim Wallace, Devva Kasnitz and myself.  Again, this Thursday we hope to explore ideas to make the meetings more interesting, fun and rich for ASA members. The discussion also will help President-Elect Jay Schensul as she prepares the ASA programming for Toronto’s 2023 AAA meetings.

https://youtu.be/9CE6iwbQvEw

October 13, 2022

Rick Feinberg

Since my doctoral fieldwork in 1972 – 73, I have been connected to Anuta, a remote Polynesian community in the Solomon Islands. Over that time I’ve studied topics that range from language and kinship to navigation and voyaging. I’ll discuss how I became connected to Anuta (following a suggestion by Raymond Firth), how the topics I’ve explored are tied together, and my development of a lasting personal connection to the island and its people. That connection has led to my son being installed as a ‘chief’ and my establishment of a small fund to aid young Anutans who must travel overseas to continue their education beyond sixth grade. Administration of the fund, in turn, has led to a surprising-often exasperating; sometimes amusing-set of further adventures.

The two accompanying photos show: (1) me in 1972 attempting to call the administrative center on a short-wave radio powered by a hand-crank generator, and (2) Mark Rongokavea in 2020, dressed in cap and gown, upon graduation from medical school in Fiji with assistance from the Anuta Scholarship Fund.

Richard (Rick) Feinberg grew up in Queens, New York, attended the University of California, Berkeley, and earned graduate degrees from the University of Chicago. He completed his doctorate in 1974 and was a faculty member at Kent State University until retirement in 2018. He served for two decades on Kent State’s faculty senate, including one year as chair. He has conducted research on remote Polynesian islands of the western Pacific, with the Navajo of the southwestern US, and in a semi- rural community near his Ohio home. He currently is president on the Kent State University Retirees’ Association. He serves on the executive boards of the Fulbright Association’s Northeast Ohio chapter and of Folknet, an organization promoting traditional Americana music. In 2019, he was Fulbright distinguished chair of anthropology at Palacký University, Olomouc, in the Czech Republic. Last year, he joined the Association of Senior Anthropologists’ executive board.

September 8, 2022

Rick Wilk

Economic and social inequality are fundamental issues for anthropology. The earth’s atmosphere is a common-pool resource which belongs to all the planet’s inhabitants, but we do not all make equal contributions to the causes of greenhouse gas emissions, nor will we all share the consequences. The rich as individuals, and rich countries more generally, are responsible for a lot more carbon emissions, and their wealth allows them to evade much of their impact. In this talk we will discuss the carbon footprints of prominent billionaires and discuss some of the ways their profligate use of common resources could be curbed.

Richard Wilk is Distinguished Professor and Provost’s Professor Emeritus at Indiana University where he co-founded a PhD program in the anthropology of food, and the Indiana University Food Institute. He has lived and worked in Belize for over than 40 years, and more recently in Singapore. Trained as an economic and ecological anthropologist, his research has covered many different aspects of global consumer culture. The author of many books and papers, his most recent books include two co-edited collections one with Emma McDonell titled Critical Approaches to Super Foods (Bloomsbury Academic 2020) and the other Seafood: Ocean to Plate (Routledge, 2018), co-authored with Shingo Hamada.