IUN Anthropology News Jan 17, 2004
1) EVENTS AT IUN
1A) anthro club meetings and discussions
1B) Play examines life, death and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
1C) Suzan-Lori Parks topic of book discussion at IU Northwest
1D) Teaching history through dolls
2) Events elsewhere
2A) Evanston at the Indian Museum
2B) in Chicago: CAPA, Rock Music in Spanish
2C) at Notre Dame University, South Bend IN, 2 events:
Scientists in Siberia and Jewish Museums
3) some other local Anthro programs and their web sites
4) summer field schools and classes: Mexico, Ireland, Czech Republic
5) two paid research/learning opportunities for students and faculty at the
Field Museum in ethnographic community studies.
1A) Anthro Club Meeting Thurs January 22, 1 pm Savannah 207; the first meeting
was mostly business, but now there should be time for open discussion, too;
bring a topic or we shall have to draw one form the Vessel of Intrigue.
Schedule and minutes of meetings are now posted on the new club web site, see
below.
Friday January 30, IUN Anthropology Club event in Savannah 207;
4 pm, meeting & food reception, 5 pm video and discussion: Walking with Cavemen
from the Discovery Channel
The new IUN Anthropology Club page is up thanks to the efforts of Mike
Maroulis, dept administrative assistant, at: http://www.iun.edu/~anthronc/
It lists events and schedule of club meetings, and minutes of the previous club
meetings. Send submissions, links, and photos to mmarouli@iun.edu
Thanks Mike.
Other Events at IUN:
1B) "Martin and Me," a multimedia theatrical celebration honoring Martin
Luther King, Jr., one of the greatest men in American history, will take place
Sunday, Jan. 18 at 4 p.m. in the Tamarack Theatre at Indiana University Northwest.
The hour-long, free performance includes music, poetry, video and dramatic
interpretation to recall the life, death and legacy of the man often called a
"drum major" for peace. Written and directed by nationally known playwright
James H. Chapmyn, the performance seeks to put flesh on King's memory. A
powerful video opens the play and sets the tone for the fundamental message of
the play: Martin is not a day, or a building, or a street.
On his Web site (www.chapmyn.com) Chapmyn says Martin is dying, becoming stone,
unattainable to the next generation of leaders. "This play is not a history
lesson, it is a theatrical celebration of the greatest men in American history.
The further Martin is removed from his humanity the least likely we are to see
him as a role model," Chapman writes.
Following the performance, Chapmyn will answer questions and lead the audience
in a discussion he hopes will challenge them to introspection, reflection and
action.
"I encourage everyone to come out to be entertained as well as enlightened. As
we are all on high alert with the happenings of our country, we need to
remember the simple but very pertinent message of Dr. King; the message of
freedom and equality for all," said Tameka Chihota, special events coordinator
for IU Northwest.
This event is sponsored by the Center for Cultural Discovery and Learning
Diversity Programming Group. For more information, please contact (219) 981-5609.
1C) Indiana University Northwest will host a book club discussion of "Getting
Mother's Body, the debut novel by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori
Parks on Friday, Jan. 23 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. in the Savannah Center,
room 107. A buffet style dinner will be provided at 5 p.m.
In April 2002 Suzan-Lori Parks became the first black woman playwright to be
awarded a Pulitzer Prize for drama for her play "Topdog/Underdog." Her first
novel, Getting Mother's Body, is a critically acclaimed work of fiction often
compared to the classic works of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker.
The novel follows dirt poor, pregnant 16-year-old Billy Beede, the teenage
daughter of the fast-running, no-account, and six-years-dead Willa Mae, who
comes home one day to find a fateful letter waiting for her: Willa Mae's burial
spot in LaJunta, Arizona, is about to be plowed up to make way for a
supermarket. As Willa Mae's only daughter, Billy is heiress to her mother's
substantial but unconfirmed fortune-a cache of jewels that Willa Mae's lover,
Dill Smiles, is said to have buried with her. Living in a trailer with her Aunt
June and Uncle Roosevelt behind a gas station in a tumbleweedy Texas town,
Billy knows that treasure could mean salvation. So she steals Dill's pickup
truck and, with her aunt and uncle in tow, heads for Arizona with Dill in hot
pursuit. While everyone agrees it's only polite to speak of getting mother's
body and moving her to a proper resting place, it's well understood that
digging up Willa Mae's diamonds and pearls will make the whole trip a lot more
worthwhile.
Suzan-Lori Parks is a novelist, playwright, songwriter and screenwriter. A
graduate of Mount Holyoke College, where she studied with James Baldwin, she
has taught creative writing in universities across the country, including at
the Yale School of Drama, and she heads the Dramatic Writing Program at
CalArts. She is currently writing an adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel
Paradise for Oprah Winfrey, and the musical Hoopz for Disney. She lives in
Venice Beach, Cali., with her husband, blues musician Paul Scher, and their pit
bull, Lambchop.
The discussion is sponsored by the IU Northwest Center for Cultural Discovery
and Learning Programming Group, Women's Studies Program and Student Services.
Please call (219) 980-6986 to RSVP for the buffet style dinner.
1D) Indiana University Northwest will host an exhibition featuring more than
300 African-American dolls, including the controversial Topsy Turvy doll.
From Jan. 26-30 the dolls from nationally recognized collector, Jamila Jones,
will be on display at the Gallery Northwest in Tamarack Hall. A reception in the
gallery will be held from Noon to 2 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 26. At 12:30 p.m.
Jones will give a lecture describing the historical overview of her collection.
On Monday, Feb. 9 visitors can view the dolls in the Library Conference Center.
Jones will lecture at 11 a.m. followed by a raffle drawing at 12:30 p.m.
One-dollar raffle tickets can be purchased at the Gallery Northwest. Winners
must present at the drawing. The proceeds will be directed towards community
outreach programming in mentoring and tutoring by student organization HYPE
(Helping Young People through Education), which is sponsored by the Multi
Cultural Affairs Program.
Jones has been collecting dolls for more than 40 years. Some were given to her
as a child, others she collected later. Her collection features rag, bisque,
hand made and the controversial Topsy Turvy style dolls. Topsy Turvy is
two-sided featuring a black doll with a headscarf on one end and a white doll
in an antebellum-style dress on the other. Manufactured in the early 1900s,
experts disagree on whether the dolls were meant for slave children who had to
display the white face in front of the master or were given as "maid dolls" to
white children.
Born in Montgomery, Ala., she was 9 years old when she became a member of the
Rosa Parks Youth NAACP group, formed prior to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and
became active in the civil rights movement. She is a founder of the Pan-African
Work Center, which is an independent black elementary school, and a member of
the Harambee Singers.
The exhibition is sponsored by the IU Northwest Center for Cultural Discovery
and Learning Diversity Programming Group and the Office of Student
Affairs/Multicultural Affairs Program. For more information, please call (219)
980-6763.
2A) Events at the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian, Evanston Ill (about
55 miles from IUN) http://www.mitchellmuseum.org/
Sunday, January 25, 1:00 p.m. Beading Workshop with Dorothy Antonio (Apache).
$10 materials fee. Intended for ages 15 and up.
Saturday, February 4, 2:00 p.m. Native American Flutes and Flute Music, Mike
Becker (Waubansee Community College)
Sunday, February 15, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m Flute Concert with Al Jewer
Sunday, February 15 The Other Southwest exhibit opens
2B)In Chicago:
The CAPA meeting at DePaul is Tuesday, January 27, 2004 7:00-9:00 PM; I do not
have details yet, their site is at: http://www.erickamenchen.net/capa/meetings.htm
at UIC: La Penya de UIC-Una noche de Rock en Espanol
We welcome everybody to come and have fun in La Penya de UIC on January 22,
2004 at 7:00. We will have a night of Rock en Espanol. Come and bring a friend,
we will have open Mic. Dare yourself to go on stage and sing on your own or
with the singers.
Music by: Damian Rivero (Argentina), Ivana Horbatenko (Argentina), Luis Jahn
(Argentina)
Poetry by: Eduardo Barraza (Chile)
It's free admission!!! Refreshments will be sold.
La Penya is a gathering place that provides learning opportunities from a
mixture of Latin American cultures. La Penya is an event where people get
together to converse, sing, recite poetry, and scrutinize art and theater. Some
special characteristic about La Penya is that the audience can offer comments
to the presenting artists for them to improve the performance or the writing
process, that way they work together to synthesize more culturally the event.
The event will take place in the Rafael Cintron-Ortiz Cultural Center, 750 S.
Halsted, Lecture Center B2.
For more information: 312-996-3095 or visit our website at www.uic.edu/depts/lcc
2C) At Notre Dame:
The Department of Anthropology Presents
Amy Ninetto, New York University
"Science in a Cold Climate: Postsocialist Modernity and Global Laboratories in
a Siberian Science City"
Monday, January 19, 2004 4:30 PM
119 O'Shaughnessy Hall
University of Notre Dame
Researchers in the Siberian science city of Akademgorodok are engaging with
what they call "world science" in complex and often paradoxical ways since the
collapse of state socialism. Akademgorodok was founded in the 1950s as a
symbol of the Soviet Union's scientific and technological prowess: Khrushchev
believed that physically locating scientists and scientific research
institutions in Siberia would modernize the vast territory. Scientists
themselves, however, came to Siberia not so much out of an interest in
competing with Western science, but with hopes of making Soviet science a
leading part of it. Since perestroika and the subsequent demise of the Soviet
Union, however, the terms on which Akademgorodok scientists engage "world
science" have changed. This paper places Akademgorodok scientists' patterns of
transnational migration in the context of postsocialist relations to the
capital, Moscow, and to changing structures of scientific labor in the West.
While they remain interested in becoming a part of world science, they are
increasingly concerned about maintaining the local and national specificity of
their scientific style-the ways in which Russian or Siberian research
questions, methodologies, and logics might be distinctive from those of other
local sciences. This emphasis on local specificity both enables and
complicates Akademgorodok science's integration into "world science." Bringing
together science studies, the anthropology of globalization and
transnationalism, and the anthropology of postsocialism, this paper suggests
that "local and global" can usefully be conceptualized as sets of relations
invoked in particular contexts rather than as empirical descriptions of
differences in scale.
Also at Notre Dame:
The Department of Anthropology Presents
Jeffrey Feldman, New York University
"Jewish Museum Tactics: Community Situations in Multicultural Italy"
Thursday, January 22, 2004 5:00 PM EST
240 DeBartolo Hall
University of Notre Dame
Anthropologists who study museums have typically focused on the problem of
representing cultural practices in museums. In this presentation, by contrast,
I examine museum practices as they appear in the daily life of a community.
The question I pose is: How do practices such as collection and display,
bookstore sales and café dining, enter into the daily lives of an ethnic
community, and how does an ethnographic view of this process contribute to the
anthropology of public culture? To answer, I turn to my fieldwork in Bologna,
where for several years I participated in and observed the activities of the
local Jewish Community center just as state officials were developing a nearby
museum of Jewish history (Il Museo Ebraico di Bologna, inaugurated in 1999).
Specifically, I examine the museum-like activities that emerged in four
different Jewish community center spaces, including: the synagogue (collections
management), the social hall (exhibition display), the secretary's office (gift
shop sales), and the kosher cafeteria (tourist dining). While the appearance
of these activities did not imply that the museum had taken over community
life, I argue that they constituted a museum tactics newly deployed by local
Jews: a set of activities recognizable in their similarity to museum
practices, but used by local Jews to defend against and capitalize on the trend
in public Jewish culture sparked by the museum. Ultimately, an ethnographic
perspective of these new tactics reveals how museums not only represent
culture, but also catalyze new configurations of cultural practice.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Diane Pribbernow
Sr. Administrative Assistant
Department of Anthropology
611 Flanner Hall
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556-5611
Phone: 574-631-6433
Fax: 574-631-5760
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3) Other college Anthropology programs in our area of interest:
Notre Dame: http://www.nd.edu/~anthro
(wonderful website; be sure to check out the newsletter from last year; good
work Diane)
Northern Illinois University: http://www3.niu.edu/acad/anthro/
(They have a four-field MA program that may be of interest to IUN students.
Kat Blake, a former IUN student, has just completed her first semester there; she wrote to say many positive things about the department and the program.
If you are interested in possibly attending NIU, Kat has said I can share her comments or put you in touch with her, just send me an email.)
NIU Anthro Club: http://www.sa.niu.edu/anthro/
(great club page, with some field school info -- good job, folks)
Their links also led me to this California State U page on Osteology, just right
for my Bioanthropology students this week (click on each bone):
http://www.csus.edu/anth/physanth/bones.htm
Northeastern Illinois U is in Chicago and sounds a lot like the IUN program:
http://orion.neiu.edu/~anthro/
and: http://www.neiu.edu/~casdept/ANTH.htm
Here is one I never knew about, Lawrence University in Appleton Wisconsin:
http://www.lawrence.edu/academics/anth/
4) Spend the summer in Guadalajara Mexico taking courses in Spanish or
English, or learn Spanish, at the University of Arizona summer school there:
http://www.coh.arizona.edu/gss/
There are flyers and applications on the anthro bulletin board at IUN in
Lindenwood.
Achill Archaeological Field School, Mayo, Ireland; info on field school and
courses at: http://www.achill-fieldschool.com/
there are also brochures in the Dept on the Lindenwood bulletin board
The College of DuPage near Chicago is running an archaeological field school in
Europe: http://www.cod.edu/people/faculty/staeck/
also posters and info at IUN in Lindenwood.
5) For Chicago Area faculty teaching in ethnographic studies, $4000 stipends
to attend summer CCUC community studies institute:
Urban Research and Curriculum Transformation Institute at the Field Museum
http://www.fmnh.org/research_collections/ccuc/faculty_app.htm
For students: the same institute has a high quality internship program with
summer $$ to attend: internships are offered to graduate and undergraduate
university students so that they can gain experience doing full-time
ethnographic research in partnership with community-based organizations in
Chicago. It is conducted as participatory action research in that the Field
Museum has involved the community group in defining the research question an in
that the community group can take action based on the results, for example, to
change housing policy, to mobilize the community against polluters, or to
deliver health education programs. The research also contributes to a body of
work that documents aspects of social and cultural change occurring in the
Chicago metropolitan region. Go to
http://www.fmnh.org/research_collections/ccuc/intern.htm
or see Cara Spicer at an anthro club meeting.
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--
Bob Mucci
Associate Professor and Coordinator of Anthropology
Indiana University Northwest
3400 Broadway, Gary IN 46408
219-980-6607
RMucci@iun.edu
"Education not slogans is our motto"