A section of the American Anthropological Association
Category Archives: Thursday Chats
The “Thursday Chats” offer opportunities to greet old friends and make new ones, as well as to hear a colleague present on a topic of anthropological interest, followed by an open Q&A session. See the NEWS page for the schedule through the first part of this year. A zoom invitation will be sent out on the Community Platform about 7-10 days prior to the date of each upcoming chat.
YouTube video links: click on the URL or arrow in the middle of the screen
The following list includes the titles, speakers, and video links to the ASA Thursday Chat series of presentations since their beginning in 2021. We hope that you will find these talks interesting, informative, and provocative.
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.
Anthropologists have been employed in medical schools since the 1890s. Dennis Wiedman will discuss how and why our roles changed since then and have become more mainstreamed in medical schools and curriculums today. Wiedman discusses how his vision of a new type of medical school with a focus on community-care led to the founding of the Florida International University Wertheim College of Medicine, where anthropologist Iveris Martinez established the Society and Medicine curriculum. They discuss topics such as, how anthropology programs can better prepare students for medical school roles; translating anthropological theory, methods, and knowledge to clinical case studies; addressing health disparities and sociocultural determinants of health; navigating the culture of medicine and the culture of anthropology; status gaps and maintaining an anthropology identity. This ASA presentation aims to stimulate our senior anthropologist colleagues to reflect and discuss these applied and practicing aspects of anthropology.
Dennis Wiedman is Professor of Anthropology, Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University (FIU), Miami, Florida. He is the Founding Director of the FIU Global Indigenous Forum whose mission it is to bring the Indigenous voice to FIU, South Florida, and the World. His research interests include Native North Americans, global Indigenous health and wellbeing. He specializes in social and cultural factors for the global pandemic of Type II diabetes, and the metabolic syndrome. During more than a decade in the FIU Provost Office he was the University SACS Accreditation Officer and first Director of Program Review. He has served on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in the practicing/professional seat and is a Past-President of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA).
Iveris Martinez is Professor of the Archstone Foundation Endowed Chair in Gerontology, and Director of the Center for Successful Aging at California State University, Long Beach. Dr. Martinez was a founding faculty member of the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine (HWCOM) at Florida International University, where she served as chief of the Division of Medicine & Society and chaired the admissions committee for the college for five years. An applied anthropologist, she has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the MacArthur Foundation, among other sources for her community-based research on social and cultural factors influencing health, with an emphasis in aging, Latinos, and minority populations. She previously served as the Chair of the Board of the Alliance for Aging, Inc., the local area agency on aging for Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties, and President of the Association for Anthropology, Gerontology, and the Life Course. She received a joint PhD in Anthropology and Population & Family Health Sciences (Public Health) from Johns Hopkins University.
The imperialist domination of the Americas after Columbus, legitimated by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, created a Manifest Destiny ideology with the social-charter myth that Columbus was the first outsider to see America. Upholding the ideology meant forbidding research into possible earlier transoceanic voyages, and this remains foundational. In her early career, Dr. Kehoe was considered a maverick because she persisted as a professional archaeologist though being a married woman. Alice has collaborated with geographers in building a compelling case for at the least, Norse beginning 1000 CE, Polynesians, and medieval Asian merchants in the spice trade c. 1200. In this talk, she elaborates on the motivations behind this taboo, while simultaneously debunking it.
Alice Beck Kehoe is a professor of anthropology emeritus at Marquette University. She is the author or editor of twenty books, including North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology, and North America Before the European Invasions. Since her retirement, she has continued to be active in research and writing. Her memoir, entitled Girl Archaeologist: Sisterhood in a Sexist Profession, was published in February 2022. It is a story not only of a woman’s persistence in a scientific field but of speaking truth to power.
Focusing on the recording of a bluegrass song she cowrote in the Sardinian language that foregrounds rurality, place, and nostalgia for a Sardinian past, Dr. Jacobsen examines themes of Sardinian language stigma, cultural intimacy, and ordeals of language as they emerged in the process of writing, recording and performing this song which you will hear in the talk.
Kristina Jacobsen is an associate professor in two departments – music and anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She is an ethnographer, singer-songwriter, and ethnomusicologist who has studied Navajo country music. Her book The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language and Diné Belonging (2017) was the winner of the 2018 IASPM-US Woody Guthrie Award for most outstanding book on popular music. Dr. Jacobsen is a touring singer-songwriter, fronts the all-female honky-tonk band Merlettes, is the founder and co-facilitator of the UNM Honky-Tonk Ensemble, and has released four albums of her own songs.
Dr. Fairbanks retired in 2007 and starting in 2009 began walking across the United States, with the help of and support of his wife, Carole. Starting in California, with various breaks in time, it took five years, but the interaction with the people he met during the walk gave him a deeper understating of both the people and the nation. During his talk, he explains the why, the what and the where of his many experiences and their anthropological significance.
William (Bill) Fairbanks received his PhD in Anthropology from UC-Santa Barbara in 1975. He spent most of his career teaching at Cuesta College (San Luis Obispo, Ca), where he had responsibility for both sociology and anthropology. He taught up to seven course preparations a year. Bill often took students to conferences and served on many committees of various anthropological organizations.
Dr. Sharon Gmelch, University of San Francisco and Union College, gives an illustrated talk about her return to Ireland to interview Irish Travellers, an indigenous nomadic minority group, and about the changes that have occurred in their culture since her first field work among them in 1971-72. The use of fieldwork photographs taken by George Gmelch proved to be an effective way to get Travellers to reflect on their changed lives. The results of this research were published in 2014 as Irish Travellers: An Unsettled Life. A documentary film was also made about Sharon and George’s return research.
Sharon Bohn Gmelch earned a PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her interests include visual anthropology, gender, ethnicity, and tourism. She is the author of ten books, including Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman (1986/91), which was a finalist for anthropology’s Margaret Mead award, and The Tlingit Encounter with Photography (2008). She also co-produced an ethnographic film on the Tlingit. She has conducted research in Ireland, Barbados, Alaska, and the Napa Valley, and published Tasting the Good Life: Wine Tourism in the Napa Valley (2011, with George Gmelch). Her most recent book is In the Field: Life and Work in Cultural Anthropology (2018, with George Gmelch).
