Celebrate with Us

(2010-12, Musicology) Wesleyan University, Deputy Provost, Dean of Arts and Humanities, Professor of Music

During the eighteenth century, Indigenous musicians in rural South America created a new, distinctive musical style. Living in Jesuit missions under colonial rule, they fostered vibrant scenes of choral and orchestral performance; they trained and re-trained each other in singing, conducting, instrument building, and composition. The music they wrote, preserved today in Bolivian mission archives, was quite different from the church repertoire of colonial cities. This music had striking, soaring melodies accompanied by clear and simple harmonies. It sounded much more like the newest compositions then popular in Europe. “Colonial Galant” gives name to the distinctive musical style of these anonymous Indigenous composers. The style is a streamlined, melody-driven version of the European galant style, which was a precursor to Mozart and Haydn. By analyzing its patterns and listening to its sounds, we are able to learn how this colonial artform carried great aesthetic power but also served as an effective tool of empire.

Read more about Roger Grant

(2008-10, Physics), Syracuse University, Physics, Professor

This presentation will discuss how we use cosmological observations to understand the nature of time. In particular, I will discuss theories for the origin of the universe (philosophically as well as physics) and how we connect this to observations. I will also reminisce about my time at the University of Michigan and being a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows.

Read more about Scott Watson

(2015-17, German), University of Chicago, History, Associate Professor of German History and the College

In 1946, an ecumenical committee of Lutheran and Catholic campanologists sought to remake the sonic presence of Christianity in the public soundscape of postwar Germany. Their work was occasioned in part by the utter devastation of German church bells through Nazi requisitioning during the Second World War. For German campanologists, wartime losses presented a welcome opportunity to rethink the role of bells, not only in the lives of the Christian faithful, but in public life at large. This paper examines this claim by addressing the uneasy relationship between sound, material, and morality at its core. If German campanologists were confident in the importance of bells to postwar society, they were deeply divided on the precise ways in which their transformative impact on the unwitting listener should best be realized. How should a postwar bell sound? Of what should it be made? What kind of historical associations should it evoke? In a period of profound material scarcity, how much should it reasonably cost? As campanologists, church officials, and everyday Germans debated these questions, they also wrestled with the imbrication of bells in wartime violence, and the capacity of their resonance to effectuate peace.

Read more about Alice Goff

(2004-07, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology), University of California Berkeley, Integrative Biology, Professor

The rainforests of the Amazon basin harbor the highest species richness on the planet as well as some of the largest stores of carbon dioxide and fresh water, not to mention the home of hundreds of unique indigenous cultures and languages. In this presentation, I review current hypotheses of geological, biogeographic, and ecological processes that have resulted in biodiversity being concentrated in the Amazon and use some examples from my own research in tree speciation and coexistence to explain how interactions among trees, insects, fungal pathogens and environmental gradients can create conditions for high biodiversity. Finally, I conclude with an examination of the reasons why people value biodiversity and which concepts have been considered the most compelling in the over thirty years since the word was invented.

Read more about Paul Fine

(2004-06, Anthropology), McGill University, Anthropology, Associate Professor and Anthropology for the Ecozoic Lead

For the Amazonian healers and activists I have worked with over the past decade, the world is a mind-manifesting or psyche-delic forest. It is from this that they develop an ecological ethics and politics, an art of living informed by the ways in which the forest manifests mind. The ‘wild guess’ at the heart of this presentation is that mind-manifestation is central to life, that its living logic can guide us. This requires bringing shamanic and biological understandings of the forest into creative dialogue. This is a kind of ‘diplomacy.’ The goal of a diplomat is to bring disparate parties together to recognize common but threatened ground. That ground is forest. The threat is a planet-wide failure to treat it as home. The goal is not to translate but to grasp the greater whole that can emerge from the ensemble.

Read more about Eduardo Kohn

(2023-25, English Language & Literature), University of Miami, English, Assistant Professor

This presentation looks at forestry in British India to analyze its disciplinary understanding of forests. Nineteenth-century imperial forestry conceptualized forests as legal entities that could be owned, used, and known. It thus constructed an understanding of forests as property governed by laws in the service of science and sustainability. Popular nineteenth-century literary representations of forests draw on this dominant legal framework of forestry. In Kipling’s Mowgli stories, for instance, the law of the jungle is at once a law of species harmony and of human hierarchy. Forest law thus creates forests as spaces reserved for the British government’s benevolent attempts at reforestation. Drawing on the legal imaginary of forestry, I show how imperial reforestation becomes implicated with the racialized logics of empire. I argue that the story of imperial forestry’s development, and the stories it engenders, reveal an enduring understanding of environmental sustainability as multispecies harmony that radically decenters the human by overwriting the humanity of Indian adivasis or indigenous forest tribes.

Read more about Meghna Sapui

(1993-96, Romance Languages and LIteratures), Indiana University, History, Distinguished Professor

Our age is dominated by FinTech. In the USA alone, over 10,000 firms (from Visa and Mastercard through PayPal, Stripe, Chime, RobinHood etc.) promises technology-based solutions to ordinary people’s financial headaches. Widely associated with buzzy innovation and high stock valuations, FinTech has expanded enormously over the last two decades (in 2021, it attracted more than 20% of all venture capital funding). Yet there is a dark side to FinTech as well: “earned wage access” tools are most often disguised (high-interest-rate) payday loans; start-up founders (such as Charlie Javice) have been convicted of fraudulently misrepresenting their own successes; and many are suspected of preying on vulnerable, cash-strapped consumers. In Africa, the success of M-Pesa has made cellphone companies into some of the continent’s most important “bankers”; in the USA, Rocket Mortgages (formerly Quicken Loans) is similarly one of the top mortgage originators and not a bank at all.

FinTech seems a very contemporary story but precursors can be found, dating at least to Matthew Boulton’s large-scale manufacture of currency for the British East India Company. In this talk, I will focus on one especially notorious instance—the system of payment in scrip and company stores, common throughout the coal-mining districts of Appalachia and beyond—and especially on the (hitherto completely unstudied) Ohio firms that actually manufactured and aggressively marketed metallic scrip. What do their successes (and failures) suggest for the future of FinTech today?

Read more about Rebecca Spang

(2017-20, Economics), Harvard Business School, Business, Government, and the International Economy, Assistant Professor

While current levels of economic inequality in Africa receive ample attention from academics and policymakers, we know little about the region’s long-run inequality trajectories. Even the new and influential “global inequality literature,” associated with scholars such as Thomas Piketty, Branko Milanovic, and Walter Scheidel, has had little to say about Africa so far. In this talk, I chart the long-run patterns and drivers of inequality in Africa from the slave trades to the present, building on recent research in African economic history and utilizing the theoretical frameworks of the global inequality literature. My analysis dismantles mainstream narratives about the colonial roots of persistent high inequality in post-colonial Africa and shows that existing inequality concepts and theories need further calibration to account, among others, for the role of African slavery in the long-run emergence and vanishing of inequality regimes.

Read more about Marlous van Waijenburg

(2012-14, Afroamerican & African Studies), Yale University, History, 1954 Professor of History and Black Studies

The United States Supreme Court has made it nearly impossible to prove that a particular law is racially discriminatory. Under the standards the Court established in the 1970s, archival materials are the only available evidentiary sources that can be used to prove discriminatory intent behind the enactment of criminal and civil laws. Although the proof lies in the historical record, it has yet to be fully utilized in this manner. Focusing her discussion on crime control policies enacted in the 1980s and 1990s, Elizabeth Hinton will explore opportunities within archives to combat racial discrimination and advance social justice through the law.

Read more about Elizabeth Hinton

(2008-10, History of Art), Harvard University, History of Art & Architecture, Professor

Since the eighteenth century, west central Africans have created empowered objects called minkisi (sing. nkisi) that combined material and spiritual elements drawn from the cross-currents of Atlantic commercial networks to manage the effects of long-distance trade on local societies. Europeans who witnessed and at times partook in the social agency of minkisi, turned to the neologism of “fetish” to convey their perception of the objects’ powers.

This talk reflects on the background and trajectory of one of these powerful figures, seized in 1878 from the rulers of Mboma at the mouth of the Congo River by the Belgian merchant Alexandre Delcommune. It analyzes the figure as a historical object i.e., in French philosopher Merleau Ponty’s words, a fetish that, from its creation to its current life as museum object, has bound together Africans and Europeans as frame and actor of their shared history.

Read more about Cecile Fromont

(2019-21, Sociology), University of California San Diego, Sociology, Associate Professor

This talk examines the social construction and practical management of mass asylum-seeking during the 2021-2024 “crisis” at the US-Mexico border. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in San Diego, California and El Paso, Texas, it shows how the federal and municipal governments used novel techniques—dumping people on the street, bussing them across jurisdictions, bureaucratically reclassifying them, or creating zones of non-enforcement—to cope with the logistical challenge posed by huge waves of migrants. Although puzzling for scholars of immigration, these governance procedures parallel the management of a different population: deinstitutionalized psychiatric patients and the urban homeless. Tracing the parallels between these cases, the talk explores when and how governments shift from confinement and exploitation to cost reduction and managing the politics of sight.

Read more about Neil Gong

(2008-11, Anthropology), Rutgers University, Anthropology, Associate Professor

In 1896 the Ottoman sultan issued a decree that allowed Armenians—and only Armenians—to migrate on the condition that they expatriate and never return to their homeland. A key step in this process was sitting for a photograph. The Ottoman state archived the photographs; the Armenian migrants received passports and left for European ports, most of them bound for the United States. Between 1896 and 1908, more than four thousand Armenians sat for such expatriation photographs. Almost two decades before photographs were attached to passports anywhere in the world, Ottoman Armenian expatriation portraiture is one of the earliest examples of the explicit use of surveillance photography for border control.

Read more about Zeynep Gürsel

(1996-99, English Language & Literature), University of California, Irvine, English, Professor

“We are a group of migrant film workers,” declared Jia Zhangke early in his career, laying the groundwork for the oft-repeated claim that he has been China’s premier chronicler of the rootless and displaced. The most celebrated of China’s “sixth generation” directors, Jia has spent the last three decades documenting the convulsive transformations that followed Deng Xioping’s 1978 announcement of the reforms that were to privatize the national economy and produce “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Most consequentially, those reforms precipitated the largest human migration in history, and a colossal primitive accumulation—that process, to quote Marx, in which producers are “forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled, as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians, on the labor market.” This presentation assesses the signature styles and strategies with which Jia has depicted this process and along the way, become, in the words of Artforum, “the moving-picture poet of the Chinese ‘economic miracle’ and of the alienation, surreal conjunctions, wrenching displacements, broken family ties, wild hopes, and unfulfilled expectations that have come in its wake.”

Read more about Michael Szalay

(2000-03, Biology), University of Pittsburgh, Microbiology & Molecular Genetics, Professor

We live in a microbial world that is constantly evolving. Nature is constantly doing millions of experiments that test which combination of traits is best for the current environment. Today’s technology allows us to watch these experiments in near real-time, teaching us for example how bacteria precisely adapt when causing a new infection being treated by an antibiotic. Not only do these discoveries hold promise for eventually forecasting evolution, they also reveal surprising and often wonderful, pre-wired capacities forged by millions of years of natural selection. To share these wonders, we developed two curricula for students in grades 6-12 in which they conduct their own evolution experiment with bacteria. Designed to replace traditional historical narratives of evolution by natural selection, students learn using authentic laboratory techniques and witness evolution happening in a week. They learn about evolution, microbiology, and the nature of heredity better and report increased occupational identities for future careers in STEM. Students even discover new bacterial mutants that adapt by the same types of mutations that related bacteria use to establish chronic infections. These discoveries advance our research program and share a sense of agency with thousands of students annually.

Read more about Vaughn Cooper

(2016-19, Middle East Studies), University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Assistant Professor & Jordan Family Fellow

Is there a way to think about occult therapeutic practices that does not reduce them to instances of superstition and charlatanry as in a post-Enlightenment, modernist framework? And how can scholars tackle the relationship, at times tense, yet not always, between medical and occult manifestations, etiologies of suffering, and mechanisms of cure? Anthropologists have long grappled with these questions, in different ways and with varying degrees of success. In this paper, I trace my own forays into these issues while studying spirit possession and psychiatry in contemporary Egypt. In this context, these are not just scholarly questions, but emic ones that animate societal deliberations among mental health experts, Islamic healers, patients, and a variety of ordinary Egyptians. By focusing the anthropological lens on these local debates, I show how they reveal profound disagreements over the nature of reality and over who has agency in the world (ontology), as well as equally deep divergences over who has the knowledge to answer such questions and what are the best disciplines to do that (epistemology). Through tracing these Egyptian controversies, this presentation reflects on what they might teach us about the limits, possibilities, and unknowability of anthropology.

Read more about Ana Vinea