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 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.