2000-2001 Ethnohistory Workshop SeriesView our SpeakersBiological Caricatures in Social ConflictProspectusHow are biological caricatures of human populations linked to social conflicts? Such caricatures have developed and circulatedin the course of European expansion, in which Europeans encountered and entered into conflict with indigenous populations inthe New World, the Pacific, Asia, Africa and elsewhere. Can the role of biological caricature be distinguished historically orethnographically from cultural characterization more generally? How did notions of 'race' develop, and what role do they play indescribing, understanding, or explaining social conflicts that emerge through the contact of populations -- for example, in thedeification of Captain Cook (associated with whiteness of skin?) or in the British relocation to Fiji of South Asians to serve as awork force distinct from the native Fijians, or in the transportation of African slaves to the New World to serve as a work force(they were considered, in colonial Brazil, constitutionally better suited for plantation labor than Native Americans)? Biological caricature is relevant not just to situations of initial contact, nor even just in connection with race. The recent history of sex and gender distinctions surrounding intersex individuals (with ambiguous genitalia) suggests a deepening of the attempt tobiologize sex and, with it, gender, with surgery performed on infants to insure their conformity with caricatured images. There are, simultaneously, representations of biological mixture -- for example, mestizaje in the New World. What role dorepresentations of mixture play within national and local contexts? For example, are they used more to fuse populations intonations or to divide them? The workshop will focus especially on narrative, myth, architecture, and other expressive forms. In what measure do biologicalcaricatures figure as explanations of conflicts, as justifications for them, or as consequences of them? How are suchrepresentations embedded in economic relations, political contexts, and broad patterns of historical change? Fall 2000September 21, 2000: Cannon Schmitt, Department of English, Duke University October 12, 2000: Faye Harrison, Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee November 2, 2000: Keletso Atkins, Department of Afro-American and African Studies, University of Minnesota November 30, 2000: Eric Cheyfitz, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
Spring 2001February 1, 2001: Greg Grandin, Department of History, Duke University February 22, 2001: Elizabeth Povinelli, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago March 22, 2001: Jennifer Robertson, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor April 19, 2001: Licia Fiol-Matta, Spanish and Latin American Cultures, Barnard College |