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

Robert Rubenstein

January 18, 2024

https://youtu.be/WMkfsOwedV0

December 7, 2023

Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori

October 9, 2023

Leslie Sponsel

The Yanomami of the Amazon in Brazil and Venezuela are one of the most famous, fascinating, studied, misrepresented, exploited, and endangered Indigenous people in the world. The Yanomami are reflected in various ways and degrees in many of the theoretical approaches and issues in the history of anthropology since the 1960s. They are a microcosm of anthropology. Moreover, they have suffered horrifically from devastating alien invasions of their traditional territory, most of all waves of illegal gold miners in the 1980s, and again in recent years. Every aspect of their population, culture, and ecology has been impacted, and for many communities in devastating ways. Building on his recent book, The Yanomami in the Amazon: Toward an Ethical Anthropology beyond Othering, Les Sponsel will discuss in historical perspective the research and controversies and scandals surrounding the Yanomami and as well as a few of the more than one hundred anthropologists who have had the unique privilege of living and studying with them. Sponsel will home in on professional ethics and human rights, as well as the changing political ecology of the Yanomami and of anthropology. The talk will also inform the Yanomami case as a component of the “human nature industry” which erroneously and dangerously celebrates the ubiquity of warfare through ideologically driven Hobbesian pseudoscience.

Dr. Leslie E. Sponsel is Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawai’I. He earned his B.A. in Geology from Indiana University (1965), and the M.A. (1973) and Ph.D. (1981) in Biological Anthropology from Cornell University. Over the last four decades he taught at seven universities in four countries, including two as a Fulbright Fellow (Venezuela and Thailand). In 1981, he was hired to develop and direct the Ecological Anthropology Program at the University of Hawai`i. His courses include Ecological Anthropology, Environmental Anthropology, Primate Behavioral Ecology, Spiritual Ecology, Sacred Places, Anthropology of Buddhism, Ethics in Anthropology, and Anthropology of War and Peace. Although retired since August 2010, usually he teaches one course each semester and devotes the remainder of his time to research and publications. From 1974 to 1981, Sponsel conducted several trips to the Venezuelan Amazon to research biological and cultural aspects of human ecology with the Yanomami and other Indigenous societies. Almost yearly since 1986 Sponsel visits Thailand to research aspects of Buddhist ecology and environmentalism together with his wife, Dr. Poranee Natadecha-Sponsel. In recent years, their research has focused on sacred caves in northern Thailand. Sponsel’s extensive publications include numerous journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia articles, four monographs, three edited books, and two co-edited books. He also publishes in other fields to better integrate his work with different subjects and broaden his audiences. He is one of the pioneers in developing the interdisciplinary subjects of spiritual ecology, nonkilling anthropology, and ethnoprimatology.

September 14, 2023

Riall W. Nolan

A casual question from my advisor in the Spring of my senior year set me off on a trajectory I would never have imagined. I’d like to chat about how and why I “came to” anthropology, and what I’ve tried to do with it over the years. During my career, I learned a bit about the institutions we’ve created (as Mary Douglas pointed out to us) to do our thinking for us, and how they act to both enable and impede our efforts to address global challenges. I’ll finish the talk by discussing some of our efforts to create a professional arm for our discipline, why that’s increasingly important, and how senior anthropologists should support these efforts.

Riall W. Nolan is Professor Emeritus at Purdue University. He has a doctorate in social anthropology from the University of Sussex. About his career, he writes: “In 1965, the Peace Corps sent me to Senegal, and my life changed forever. I spent the next twenty years living and working overseas, teaching, researching and managing international development projects. I lived for years in widely diverse places – Papua New Guinea, Senegal, Tunisia, and Sri Lanka. When I decided to come back to the US in the mid-80s, I managed international programs at several large US universities, where my goal was to get as many young Americans out of town as possible. This took up another twenty years of my life. In 2010, I finally rejoined the faculty full-time. A few years later, I began to split my time between my US university and the University of Cambridge in the UK. At Cambridge, I taught people how to incorporate anthropology into development work. In the US, I worked with students to help prepare them for non-academic careers. Anthropology has enormous potential to help us change how we relate to the world and the people in it. I have always worked, inside and outside the university, to help younger anthropologists realize this potential. It is a slow and sometimes frustrating process, but very worthwhile. I’m still at it.”

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.