Wednesday, March 6th, 2 pm in Schwartz 106
Anthropology Colloquium Series: Susan Gillespie
“The Entanglement of Jade and the Rise of Mesoamerica”
The rise of complex societies across Mesoamerica in the Middle Formative period (c. 900 -500 BC) coincided with the establishment of fundamental organizing principles for socio-cosmic order that were widely shared and set a trajectory for future developments. This “Formative Revolution” was materially enabled by public architecture, monumental sculptures, and new media of wealth, particularly jade. Jade, understood here as “social jade” to include various minerals (principally jadeite and serpentine), was valued for its utilitarian affordances of hardness and durability, but human-jade interactions revealed other “enchanting” qualities that were caught up in human-jade interdependencies, contributing to ideas of social difference and hierarchy.
How jade became a “shaper of civilizations” has not previously been investigated holistically. Scholarly attention has focused instead on certain shared “symbolic” meanings of jade as these were expressed in pan-Mesoamerican cosmology. A genealogy of jade is required to understand how jade reached a pinnacle of value in Mesoamerican thought and practice that was never superseded, not even by gold. Theories drawn from studies of “materiality”–in particular, the notion of entanglement–provide a comprehensive framework to examine how jade and humans were drawn into interdependent relationships.
This presentation sketches different aspects of the entanglement as they may have developed in the Early and Middle Formative Periods, emphasizing the physical qualities of jade and jade-working, their salient effects in human-jade interdependence, and the innovated temporalities and subjectivities that resulted.
Susan Gillespie is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. Her research interests include archaeology, ethnohistory, iconography, and epigraphy of Mesoamerica (focusing on Aztecs, Mayas, and Olmecs); kinship, kingship, and socio-political organization; cosmology and political ideologies; symbolic, structural, and semiotic anthropology; archaeological and social theory; the anthropology of history; the anthropology of art and technology. Gillespie’s book, The Aztec Kings: The Construction of Rulership in Mexica History (1989), won the 1990 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize awarded by the American Society for Ethnohistory.
March 4th, 2013
A Brown Bag Seminar with Dr. Aria Nakissa
Monday, February 25, 2013
12:15-1:45pm, Lurias, Hassenfeld Conference Center
In this talk, Dr. Aria Nakissa will examine the political nature of attempts to define “freedom of religion” in the context of current developments in Egypt. It will argue that while on the one hand Islamist conceptions of freedom of religion have specifically been designed to ensure that non-Islamic forms of religiosity are suppressed, on the other, secular liberal conceptions have a similar purpose, operating to outlaw conventional forms of Islam. As such, this talk will illustrate how, contrary to appearances, discourses on the need to protect “freedom of religion” often function as a strategic means to restrict unwelcome forms of religiosity.
Aria Nakissa is a Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 2012. He also holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.A. in Shari’a Law from the International Islamic University in Malaysia. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork among religious scholars at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, Nakissa’s research examines how Islamic legal discourses have been transformed by changes in modern educational practice.
February 15th, 2013
Charles Golden, associate professor of anthropology, was awarded a 2013-14 Mandel Faculty Grant to conduct a project titled “Indigenous Cultures, Past and Present: Community Engaged Archaeology in Chiapas, Mexico.” With the generous support of the Mandel Faculty Grant, professor Golden will support an ethnographically informed archaeology, facilitating collaborations with indigenous and otherwise economically underserved communities and increasing the involvement of student archaeologists in Chiapas, Mexico.
In directing the Proyecto Arqueológico Busilja – Chocolja, professor Golden and his colleagues, Andrew Scherer (Brown University) and Zachary Christman (Rowan University), will engaged in long-term archaeological and geographic research. Their goals are to better understand ancient politics in the Maya kingdoms of the first millennium CE, and to gather data concerning ancient and modern land use to model human-environmental dynamics in a region that was an ancient border zone and is today part of Mexico’s modern border with Guatemala.
The project will work with archaeology students from the Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas (UNICACH), including young men and women from indigenous communities and rural towns. The co-directors will work closely with the faculty at UNICACH to provide training and data for these students to complete their undergraduate theses and work with them in their professional development. The local knowledge, linguistic and cultural, that these students bring to the research will allow for a better interface with local communities and other stake-holders to develop a research project that is not simply driven by academic questions, but that takes accounts of local needs and interests.
November 20th, 2012
Signed into law in 1965, The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was a centerpiece of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” ESEA has been amended and reauthorized many times, most recently in the form of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act” of 2001. These interventions and other federal education policies have sought to be more quantitative data -driven and evidence-based. From the findings of randomized field trials aiming to determine whether interventions work, to value-added measures attempting to assess teacher quality on the basis of student test scores, educational value and success are increasingly established on the basis of what is measurable. How are educational practices, priorities and politics transformed in seeing educational processes through quantification? What might be the consequences of rendering the “art” of education technical?
Kathleen Hall is Associate Professor of Education and Anthropology and the Director of the South Asia Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Lives in Translation: Sikh Youth as British Citizens (2009).
Mandel 303, from 12-2 p.m. Sponsored by the Anthropology Department.
October 22nd, 2012
Come join us for a movie screening of “Jai Bhim Comrade” followed by Q&A with Indian filmmaker and Brandeis Alumnus Anand Patwardhan ’72 in the Shapiro Student Center Theater on Thursday, October 4 at 7 p.m.
October 4th, 2012
The Department of Anthropology will host a graduate student workshop on “Preparing Successful Anthropology Grant Proposals” with Charles Golden and Sarah Lamb. 12:00-1:00pm, Brown TBA.
September 18th, 2012
BrandeisNow features a story about Jessye Kass ’13, an anthropology and AAAS major who helped to create a non-governmental organization to serve schoolchildren in Africa. From the article:
With Sorensen Fellowship and DoSomething.org seed grants, Kass teamed up with Ghanaian artist Serge Clottey, whom she met at the orphanage, to co-found the Attukwei Art Foundation. The non-governmental organization aims to educate children about the world around them through art and to provide therapeutic arts programs. It has so far operated in a handful of the poorest schools and its board – on which Clottey serves as president and Kass as vice president – hopes to expand to serve HIV/AIDS communities and children who have suffered abuse.
This summer, she has returned to Ghana for the fifth time and four other Brandeis students are interning with Attukwei, which has served more than 1,000 children so far.
Read more here.
July 10th, 2012
Anthropology doctoral student Casey J. Miller has been awarded a doctoral dissertation grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange to support the final year of writing his dissertation entitled “Grassroots Gay and Lesbian Organizations, HIV/AIDS, and the Construction of Civil Society in Mainland
The Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation is a nonprofit organization from Taiwan that supports social science and humanities research on topics related to Chinese culture and society. It is well-known in the field of Chinese studies, and you can see the list of current grantees here:
June 18th, 2012
Feyza Burak Adli, an anthropology master’s student, has been awarded the 2012 Mother Board Writing Prize of GCWS (the Graduate Consortium of Women’s Studies) at MIT, for her paper on Kurdish rural women.
Graduate students from 9 area institutions (and multiple disciplines) are eligible to apply for this prize, and Brandeis anthropologists have now received the award two years in a row; Amy Hanes received it in 2011.
This writing prize is dedicated to the ‘Mother Board’, the seven feminist intellectuals in the Boston area who together conceptualized and brought the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies into existence in 1988. These women built the Consortium to be a program that would train the next generation of feminist scholars in the interdisciplinary thinking and research that is at the heart of Women’s Studies. Students who have taken or are currently taking GCWS courses may apply. Each year, one or two students are recognized with an award and cash prize for their unpublished written work that exemplifies the three tenets central to the GCWS mission: interdisciplinary inquiry; innovative
thinking; and epistemologically self-conscious investigation.
To read more about the prize, see:
June 18th, 2012
Two students in the social sciences at Brandeis, Billy Geibel MA ’12 (Politics) and Anthropology doctoral candidate Emily Canning, received Fulbright grants for the 2012-13 year.
Billy Geibel M.A. ’12, who studied politics, will teach English at a university in Turkey, while anthropology doctoral candidate Emily Canning will conduct fieldwork in the schools of Kyrgyzstan to learn how attitudes toward language and ethnicity are negotiated in educational settings there.
Both Geibel and Canning studied previously in the locations where they will be doing their Fulbright-funded work. Geibel was in Turkey as a senior at the University of California at Santa Barbara; Canning has been returning to Kyrgyzstan every year since 2007, her first year at Brandeis.
June 15th, 2012