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Bard Archaeology Students Work on Excavation at Fisher Center’s Maya Lin Building Site, Reports the Daily Catch

Bard archeology students, under the direction of Archaeologist in Residence Christopher Lindner, have been working to unearth cultural clues about the past at a dig site where the new Maya Lin performing arts studio building will be built for the Fisher Center, writes Emily Sachar for the Daily Catch.

Bard Archaeology Students Work on Excavation at Fisher Center’s Maya Lin Building Site, Reports the Daily Catch

Bard archeology students, under the direction of Archaeologist in Residence Christopher Lindner, have been working to unearth cultural clues about the past at a dig site where the new Maya Lin performing arts studio building will be built for the Fisher Center, writes Emily Sachar for the Daily Catch. Ahead of the building construction, the students hope to find artifacts of daily living that may have been used by the Lenape and Muhheakantuck (Mohican), the original stewards of the land where Bard College now resides. “The project is a demonstration of Bard’s commitment to protecting what we can of the Indigenous past,” Lindner, director of the summer Bard Archaeology Field School and Bard’s archaeologist in residence, told Sachar. “It’s a way of showing respect and doing what we can to learn before we have an impact on the land.”
Read more in the Daily Catch

Post Date: 05-09-2023

Bard College Announces the Appointment of Sucharita Kanjilal as Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Division of Social Studies

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Sucharita Kanjilal as assistant professor of anthropology. Her tenure-track appointment begins in the 2023–24 academic year. Sucharita Kanjilal is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and a former journalist from Mumbai, India. Her dissertation project, Home Chefs: Indian Housewives Produce for the Global Creator Economy, examines the entanglements of gender, race, caste, and religious nationalism in the growth of global digital capitalism, through an ethnographic study of food media producers in India.

Bard College Announces the Appointment of Sucharita Kanjilal as Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Division of Social Studies

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Sucharita Kanjilal as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Her tenure-track appointment begins in the 2023-24 academic year.
 
Sucharita Kanjilal is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and a former journalist from Mumbai, India. Her dissertation project, Home Chefs: Indian Housewives Produce for the Global Creator Economy, examines the entanglements of gender, race, caste and religious nationalism in the growth of global digital capitalism, through an ethnographic study of food media producers in India.
 
Kanjilal’s research combines approaches from economic anthropology, anthropology of media, digital anthropology, anthropology of food, and theories of affect, while highlighting feminist, postcolonial, and anti-caste epistemologies. Her work has appeared in Gastronomica, the Routledge Companion on Caste and Cinema in India, Feminist Media Studies (forthcoming), Scroll.in, Quartz.com, Hindustan Times, and the Heritage Radio Network and Eat This podcasts. She is the recipient of several grants and awards, including from the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, the Association for the Study of Food and Society, the UCLA International Institute and the Sambhi Foundation at UCLA.

Post Date: 02-12-2023

“Good Evening, we are from Ukraine.” Maria Sonevytsky Examines the Development of a Viral Phrase for the Los Angeles Review of Books

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music Maria Sonevytsky, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, reflects on how a Ukrainian phrase has transformed into a viral wartime slogan. “Good evening, we are from Ukraine,” a seemingly casual statement, has accumulated multiple meanings and layers throughout its evolution into an inclusive rallying cry for those who call the country home. “This phrase, which began as a musician’s offhand stage banter sampled into an EDM anthem, became a slogan invoked by Ukrainian politicians, soldiers, intellectuals, keyboard warriors, and their supporters around the globe,” she writes.

“Good Evening, we are from Ukraine.” Maria Sonevytsky Examines the Development of a Viral Phrase for the Los Angeles Review of Books

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music Maria Sonevytsky, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, reflects on how a Ukrainian phrase has transformed into a viral wartime slogan. “Good evening, we are from Ukraine,” a seemingly casual statement, has accumulated multiple meanings and layers throughout its evolution into an inclusive rallying cry for those who call the country home. “This phrase, which began as a musician’s offhand stage banter sampled into an EDM anthem, became a slogan invoked by Ukrainian politicians, soldiers, intellectuals, keyboard warriors, and their supporters around the globe,” she writes. For Sonevytsky, the brilliance of the statement is how its innocuous phrasing, at first glance a simple greeting, masks its inherent radicalism and defiance of the Russian’s state’s attempts to deny Ukraine’s existence. “The slogan works precisely because it does not traffic in the essentializing rhetoric of being Ukrainian,” she continues. “It is not for an individual declaring an identity: ‘I am Ukrainian.’ It is instead a collective, matter-of-fact statement: ‘We are from Ukraine.’ This also implies—and I still resent that this must be said, but here we are—that Ukraine exists, is a legitimate place, and contains people who claim it as home.”
Read more in  the Los Angeles Review of Books

Post Date: 01-23-2023

Anthropology Events

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2023

Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Olin LC 208; Olin Language Center  4:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The students of AS 315 and Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck present a two-part letter writing night in solidarity with Indigenous political prisoners Maddesyn George and Leonard Peltier:

5/15 - Community letter writing night at Blackbird Infoshop, 587 Abeel Street, Kingston, NY.

5/17 - Olin Languages Center 208; Information and letter writing night with virtual talk by Hupa abolitionist scholar Stephanie Lumsden, Gender Studies, UCLA; Maddesyn George Defense Committee.

Stephanie Lumsden (Hupa) is a scholar and teacher. She received her B.A. in Women's Studies from Portland State University in 2011 and her M.A. in Native American Studies from the University of California, Davis in 2014. She earned her second M.A. in Gender Studies from UCLA in 2018. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA . Stephanie is a 2021-2022 Ford Fellow and a recipient of the University of California President's Postdoctoral fellowship

Maddesyn George (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a survivor of domestic and sexual violence who has been incarcerated since July 2020 for defending herself against a white man who raped and threatened her. Facing a murder charge and decades in prison, Maddesyn accepted a plea deal from federal prosecutors after being incarcerated and separated from her infant daughter for more than a year. She was sentenced in the Eastern District of Washington Federal Court on November 17, 2021 to serve 6.5 years in prison.


This website is organized by Maddesyn George’s defense committee, a grassroots coalition of members of Maddesyn’s family; members of the Colville Confederated Tribes and Spokane nation; survivors of gender violence; and advocates, organizers, and scholars who work on issues of colonial, sexual, and domestic violence; policing and incarceration; and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples. Read the defense committee’s statement on Maddesyn’s sentencing

Leonard Peltier is a citizen of the Anishinabe and Dakota/Lakota nations who has been  imprisoned for 48 years. . Leonard Peltier was wrongly convicted in the 1970s for his organizing with the American Indian Movement in defense of Pine Ridge traditionalists, and is now the longest-held indigenous political prisoner in the United States. “The United States of America has kept me locked up because I am American Indian,” said the ailing Indigenous rights activist who Biden could free, but hasn’t. For more info, see the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.


Wednesday, May 3, 2023
Ketaki Pant '06, Assistant Professor of History, University of Southern California
Hegeman 106  3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Despite their centrality to Mauritius’s plantation economy, merchants from Gujarat (western India) remain in the shadows of histories of slavery and indentured labor migration on the island. This talk takes stock of these erased histories by retelling the story of one plantation, Bel Ombre, which was variously owned by French planters and Gujarati merchants in the nineteenth century. Moving between the space of Bel Ombre today, records in the Mauritius National Archives, and old ports in Gujarat, I analyze the archival processes through which Gujarati mercantile intimacies were recorded and obscured. I argue that the archival segregation of records about plantation property ownership and indentured labor was central to the erasure of Gujarati merchants from histories of racial capitalism on the island. I show that the colonial state enacted gendered violence on indentured women whose sexuality was policed and pathologized while Gujarati merchants were able to marry across racial lines through sanctioned property and marriage arrangements. These silences were amplified by Indian anticolonial nationalists who arrived on Mauritius in the twentieth century to take up the cause of Indian indentured workers but who, ironically, papered over racial capitalism in favor of a pan-Indian identity. In old ports in Gujarat, merchant families built and maintained houses (havelis) which were scrubbed clean of these messy intimacies across the ocean. Reaching across the ocean from Gujarat to Mauritius and back, this talk suggests that these are haunted houses and histories.

Ketaki Pant is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on South Asia and the Indian Ocean arena from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Her current projects examine interlinked histories of racial capitalism, gendered belonging, minoritization, and displacement centered on Gujarat. Recent publications include an article in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Asian Transnationalism.


Monday, April 24, 2023
Dr. Jill McCorkel, professor of sociology and criminology at Villanova University and the founder and executive director of the Philadelphia Justice Project for Women and Girls
Olin 102  5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Women are the fastest growing segment of virtually all sectors of the carceral system (jail, prison, parole, and probation). This is also the case at the back end of the system, among those serving extreme sentences of 50 years in prison or more. People serving these sentences refer to their experience as "death by incarceration" given that sentence length and statutory limitations and exclusions from parole eligibility guarantee that they will die in prison. The number of women serving these sentences has exponentially increased in recent decades. The vast majority are survivors of gender violence. Their criminal convictions are often directly or indirectly tied to their encounters with violence and abuse. In this talk, I'll discuss why and how this is happening and what we can and should be doing about it. 

https://www.jillmccorkel.com/
Philadelphia Justice Project for Women and Girls

 


Tuesday, April 18, 2023
  Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Why did Indigenous peasants support but ultimately resist the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla group in highland Peruvian Quechua communities? The different ways rebels and government security forces interacted in each Andean community explain the diverse peasant responses. At first, the politics of pursuing social justice mobilized a large part of the rural population, especially the youths, who often sympathized with the Maoist revolution. The motivating factors in engaging with the insurgency in rural communities include local experiences of state neglect, social inequality, power relation, and fear and intimidation. Shining Path’s mounting authoritarianism, most notably their brutal killing of community authorities and demand that peasants withdraw from the market economy, explains the root of violent peasant uprisings against the rebels. The Indigenous struggle involved making the anti-guerrilla and pro-state coalition called the Pacto de Alianza entre Pueblos. It brought internal security and order, allowing Indigenous peasants to maintain daily life and protect their local affairs in wartime violence. The Pacto de Alianza was not limited to the counterinsurgency goals; its functions extended to the local governance, social cohesion, and post-conflict reconstruction.


Friday, April 7, 2023
Russian-Ukrainian war
Olin, Room 203  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This teach-in will not only uncover some histories of Russian oppression and colonial domination within Ukrainian context, but will also include a panel discussion where students from other post-soviet countries will share their experience with Russification and how it affects their daily life.

Since the event is during lunch time, a free meal and drinks will be provided.

Looking forward to seeing you on Friday, April 7 in Olin 203!

RSVP


Wednesday, March 29, 2023
  Dr. Noriko Kanahara '04, Waseda University-Tokyo
Olin 102  5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This talk explores how in the 1920s through the early 1940s, Japanese state officials determined whether or not to accept Turkic Muslim refugees from the former Russian Empire. Though at most 1000 in number, the refugees left a significant impact not only on how Japanese state officials understood Islam and the power of Muslim networks in global politics, but also on how these officials formed national consciousness in contradistinction to them. Analysis of the journals of the Japanese intelligence police reveals that although the police considered the refugees' religion as an important marker, the refugees’ political interests were most significant in determining whether or not to accept them in Japan. This talk demonstrates that religion and ideology, particularly Islam and Communism, impacted how the refugees established transnational relationships and how Japanese state officials demarcated the nation during the interwar and wartime periods following the Russian Revolution and throughout the Second World War. More specifically, religious and ideological ties—precisely because they were considered powerful tools of transnational mobilization—served as grounds for the Japanese state’s ambivalent reception of refugees.
 
Bio: Noriko Kanahara graduated from Bard College in 2004 with a BA in Anthropology. She has a PhD in History from the University of Chicago, an M.Phil. in Migration Studies from Oxford University, and an MA in Area Studies from Tokyo University. She has held postdoctoral research fellowships at Tohoku University and Waseda University in Japan. She is currently a research fellow at the Ryusaku Tsunoda Center of Japanese Culture at Waseda University. 

This event has received generous support from the Anthropology, Asian Studies, and Global & International Studies programs.


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