October 16, 2025

Zoom link: [pending]

Dr. Phil Stevens, SUNY Buffalo

Talk summary:

Magic and witchcraft are among the most-studied topics in all the social sciences and humanities. Early in his career Phil Stevens realized some neglected but critically important aspects of them, and last year his conclusions were published by Routledge. He will talk to us about the 6 characteristics of the best meaning of “magic,” and the 14 attributes of ethnological-historical witchcraft, that indicate these are universal, inherently human, perhaps rooted in the evolutionary biology of our species. His description of “magical thinking” reveals universally similar cognitive processes; these are evident in several ritual concepts and practices, including the magical act, sorcery, communication, taboo and pollution, divination, and magical protection and healing. The witch combines universal human fears and fantasies; in societies which lack witches, these manifest in other supernatural forms.

Bio:

Phil Stevens received his B.A. from Yale in English in 1963, then worked for three years with the Peace Corps in Nigeria. (During that time, he taught high school English, and worked for the federal Antiquities Department on several projects of traditional art, including the Stone Images of Esie, which he has called “Africa’s Greatest Mystery”.) He entered the graduate anthropology program at Northwestern, returned to Nigeria for dissertation research, and received his Ph.D in 1973.  During 48 years with the anthropology department at the State University of New York, Buffalo, he conducted further research in Nigeria and the Caribbean, received two awards for teaching and an honorary Nigerian chieftaincy title, and published many items in anthropology and African studies. He retired in 2019.

September 25, 2025

Zoom link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF2XQaG25TA

Dr. Murray J. Leaf – The University of Texas, Dallas

Talk summary:

An empirical theory of social organization must be grounded in an empirical theory of ideas, i.e., an empirical epistemology. Empirical epistemology was developed during the Enlightenment, and to a large extent, it was the enlightenment. It freed all philosophy–all thought carried out only for its own sake–from any sort of supernatural or unempirical postulations or assumptions. On the other hand, Philosophical Positivism was not part of this; it was a reaction against it

In recent times, there has been a radical transformation of ethnology. As Herb Lewis says, “This practice and this mindset are not universal, but they do pervade the work of many contemporary anthropologists and have come to characterize the field at its commanding heights. Whereas until the mid-1960s American anthropology—the four-field variety—was conceived of as an “objective” (“positivistic”) science, since anthropology’s newest revolution the very notions of positivism, objectivity, and science it-self are not only questioned but are—in some quarters—considered im- possibilities at best, lies and tools of hegemonic domination at worst. (Lewis 2009:201)”

In this Thursday Chat presentation, I will try to, first, describe the enlightenment analyses that ethnologists have lost sight of, and, second, illustrate the kind of fieldwork that re-incorporates it We will consider one key quotation from David Hume and several from Immanuel Kant. Then, third, I will show how these analyses apply to, and are validated by, the cultural frame analysis of kinship terminologies.

The transformation in ethnology had had two main components. One is the shift from science to moralizing, as Lewis describes. The other is the abandonment of kinship and social organization as a central topic – one that Lewis does not call attention to. The key to the connection between them is Lewis’ equation of “objective” with “positivistic.” This is a fundamental epistemological mistake. My main purpose in this chat is to show why that is the case.

While the postmodernists seem to be commanding, few are obeying. The AAA has 40 sections. All but three represent “specializations” that their members define as scientific–not postmodernist. The Society for Applied Anthropology is also untransformed. The topics the various empirical specializations focus on are related to each other through the members’ activities in organizations. The only thing that can pull the specializations together as a coherent science is a theory of social organizations.

Our predecessors were right to focus on social organization through extended participant observation. They were right to recognize that they had to understand organizations through the ideas of those in the community. But they were wrong to accept positivist claims that at some point they had to abandon indigenous explanations and substitute their own to be more “objective.” They knew no alternative. Yet there was one…

The alternative is to pursue the indigenous ideas to their fundamentals. Find their most basic assumptions; find their organizing and generative principles. Create a systemic analysis that lets the indigenous system stand on its own for us just as it does for those whose system it is. In this Chat, I hope to open a dialogue with the audience for re-centering and empirical epistemology in anthropology.

Bio:

Dr. Murray J Leaf is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Political Economy at The University of Texas, Dallas. Dr. Leaf is a social-cultural anthropologist, holding a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Chicago and a BA in philosophy from Reed College. When asked what his “specialty” is, he responds that he is a symbolic anthropologist, an applied anthropologist, an interpretative anthropologist, an economic anthropologist, a political anthropologist, a legal anthropologist, but maybe not? He says his basic interest is in how people think and in what the fact that we think has to do with the fact that we (human beings) have multiple social organizations, never just one. His basic conviction is that to understand this, we must look at all kinds of thought: economic, symbolic, and so on, not just one, and we have to see how they are related to one another. His basic philosophical orientation, he says, is skeptical and pragmatic. Correspondingly, he says his methodological orientation is what William James called radical empiricism. Observation must be separated from imputing. Observation requires closely disciplined restraint. This is especially difficult when what we are observing is ideas and their uses, he says. We understand what other people think by letting them tell us and following it out to the last implication while working as hard as we possibly can to avoid imposing our own preconceptions.

Dr. Leaf has served as Senior Social Scientist on the Irrigation and Water Management and Training Project, in India (1987–89), Senior Socio-Economist for the Bangladesh Flood Response Study (1990–93), and as a consultant to the United Nations Centre for Regional Development, Nagoya, Japan (1991–95). He has served on the editorial board of Regional Development Dialogue, the journal of the United Nations Centre for Regional Development, and the online anthropological journal Mathematical Anthropology and Cultural Theory. He was President of the Culture and Agriculture section and the Society for Anthropological Sciences. After receiving his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1966, Dr. Leaf began his teaching at Pomona College and then spent some years teaching at UCLA before settling in at The University of Texas, Dallas in 1975, where he spent the majority of his academic career. He has published numerous books and articles including his 2021 book (with Dwight Read) entitled An Introduction to the Science of Kinship and two volumes on world religions: Anthropology of Western Religions: Ideas, Organizations, and Constituencies, and Anthropology of Eastern Religions: Ideas, Organizations, and Constituencies, all published by Lexington Books.

Thursday, May 15, 2025

Zoom link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3daja2fM-4

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