Thursday, May 10, 2012
317 Silsby Hall
4:00-5:30 PM
From her web page at IPinCh
"Part of my agenda as a Native Alaskan scholar is to put the world of academia at the service of local communities through open, engaged scholarship. As such, I have collaborated with tribal governments, national and international organizations working to promote Indigenous cultural perpetuation, heritage and economic development throughout my professional life. After receiving a B.A. in art history
from Dartmouth College, I returned to Alaska where I worked at the Sealaska Heritage Institute and the Alaska Native Heritage Center as Program Supervisor. Subsequently, I earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA followed by appointments as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, and as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Humboldt State University. Broadly speaking, my research explores Indigenous entrepreneurship as a lens to explore the shifting politics of Indigeneity in relation to policy and development. I currently hold a Ford postdoctoral fellowship at UC Santa Cruz, where I am working on a project theorizing Indigenous capitalism(s)."
Wednesday, May 16, 2012Two partial skeletons of a new species of Australopithecus have been unearthed from a nearly two-million-year-old cave in South Africa. Though these fossils display many anatomies that align these late australopithecines with the genus Homo, the foot anatomy is surprisingly primitive. These fossils suggest that Australopithecus sediba was walking in a biomechanically unique manner, and that were was a locomotor diversity in our australopithecine ancestors.
2:30-2:50PMMy research is based on summer 2011 fieldwork in Venezuela, where I interacted with communities of African descent. Through participant observation, interviews, and casual conversation I became interested in how education, both formal and informal, serves as a means to reinforce and transform aspects of identity specific to Afro-Venezuelans. (Watanabe)
2:55-3:15PMI explored the unique lip-flip movement of the gelada baboon (Theropithecus gelada), as well as display blending capabilities. I applied FACS, the Facial Action Coding System, to video footage of social interactions between wild geladas (collected previously by Professor Dobson) in order to structurally define facial displays. I also coded associated behaviors in order to describe and compare display motivation. This project has implications for studies of the generation of complexity in animal communication systems. (Dobson)
3:20-3:40PMI spent August of 2011 in San Francisco trying to get the feel of the local "dog culture" and find owners of dogs who have issues with aggressive behavior that I could interview. I made contacts with those owners though various trainers, and with some help from my host mother and conducted 45-90 minutes interviews with them, over the phone or in person. I got to meet some of their dogs as well. I also spent time going to dog parks, attending dog training classes and Vicious and Dangerous dog hearings at the City Hall and simply walking around the city looking at how people interacted with dogs and looking at information about dogs available to people at places such as pet stores and book-shops. (Watanabe)
I worked with an NGO in northern India to research "voluntourism," in which people from developed nations travel to developing nations to volunteer. I am examining the interactions and relationships between the voluntourists and the host organization with whom they work to understand what each group expects to and does receive from the relationship. I am also analyzing moments of conflict and misunderstandings and linking them back to mismatched expectations on both sides. (Igoe)
4:25-4:45PMI spent 10 weeks conducting anthropological field research in the district of Navsari in southern Gujarat, India to explore local pregnant women's experiences with Gram Seva, a regional health care NGO. I focused my work on the ways in which women use and respond to Gram Seva's maternal-child health care efforts to improve preventative and prenatal health.I researched women's perceptions of Gram Seva's services and sought to compare their beliefs to the NGO's overarching maternal health goals. Through participant observation in both the NGO's hospital and surrounding villages, open-ended interviews, and focus groups, I gathered ethnographic details on local women's pregnancy routines and their opinions of biomedical prenatal care. Since returning from my trip, I have been using my results for my ongoing thesis, which focuses on authoritative knowledge and the ways in which local pregnant women navigate between matrifocal and institutional prenatal health care settings. I incorporate my ethnographic encounters to position Gram Seva's prenatal care services within a preexisting kinship sphere, in which mothers and mothers-in-law dictate prenatal care practices. I analyze these two sets of authoritative prenatal care knowledge to address how each shapes pregnant women's observations, perceptions, and eventual outcomes. (Craig, Gutiérrez-Nájera)
4:50-5:10PMMy research explores the ways that the volunteers and homeless clients of Den Mobile Café, a food delivery program in Copenhagen, Denmark, deal with changes to their environment and routines. It locates these changes inside the structure of the larger welfare system in Denmark, which privileges citizens over non-citizens in access to services. (Alverson, Gutiérrez-Nájera)
5:15-5:35PMI am currently writing an anthropology thesis on Yemenite Jewish wedding customs and how they reflect the social hierarchy and gender roles amongst the Yemenite Jews. A significant portion of my thesis focuses on the material culture of these weddings, namely the bride's costume and jewelry. While these elements are meant to beautify the bride, they also have more complex and ambiguous connotations related to the anxiety women felt in their day-to-day lives. Yemenite society was characterized by a strict gender separation and hierarchy, which led to personal anxiety as well as jealousy between women. This tension was manifested in a strong belief in the evil eye, the power that one can inflict harm, illness, or even death on another through a glance. A bride was particularly vulnerable to the evil eye, and her jewelry and dress offered protective powers against it, while simultaneously containing symbols of fertility. I received Goodman funding to visit the Jewish Museum in New York City, one of the only American museums that has a collection of Yemenite jewelry, to see pieces of this intricate jewelry firsthand. (Kan)
