General Anthropology Division (GAD) Distinguished Lecture

Senior Consultant, Archaeological and Cultural Education (Ace) Consultants, LLC

Recasting Anthropology: Praxis, People, and Possibilities

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Tampa, Florida | Friday, November 22, 7:30–9 pm

Well into its second century, Anthropology continues to search for its place in the world. Its founders were looking to create a new way of studying humans throughout time and space as a means of better understanding who we are, who we have been, and who we can be. Over the course of the past 50 years, I have participated in government-based archaeology, academic archaeology, and contract archaeology at the state, federal, and private levels as an anthropological archaeologist. Today’s anthropologists often find themselves in a variety of situations where more and more they must find ways of making the discipline relevant in the eyes of community members, the academic world, and even government entities. In this paper I will offer a glimpse of the ways that I believe anthropology has changed over the fifty years I have been in the discipline, the way it hasn’t, and the way it should.

University of Michigan

Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario, Canada | Friday, November 17, 8:30-9:30 pm

In this bold and provocative talk based on his book of the same title (University of California Press, 2022), Damani J. Partridge examines the possibilities and limits of a universalized Black politics. Young people in Germany of Turkish, Arab, and African descent use claims of Blackness to hold states and other institutions accountable for their everyday struggle. Partridge tracks how these youth invoke the expressions of Black Power, acting out the medal-podium salute from the 1968 Olympics, proclaiming “I am Malcolm X,” expressing mutual struggle with Muhammad Ali and Spike Lee, and standing with raised and clenched fists next to Angela Davis. Partridge also documents the demands by public-school teachers, federal-program leaders, and politicians that young immigrants account for the global persistence of anti-Semitism as part of the German state’s commitment to antigenocidal education. He uses these stories to interrogate the relationships among European Enlightenment, Holocaust memory, and Black futures, showing how noncitizens work to reshape their everyday lives. In doing so, he demonstrates how the concept of Blackness energizes, inspires, and makes possible participation beyond national belonging for immigrants, refugees, Black people, and other People of Color.

California State University Los Angeles

Who Has Permission to Write and Teach What? Cultural Expertise on “Race” in the American Courtroom and Anthropology

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Seattle Washington | Friday, November 11, 8:30-10:00 pm

The complexity and enduring problematics of issues related to the idea of race are evident in the daily news of contestation and debate around the teaching of race, critical race theory (CRT) and programs for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Who has permission to write and teach on these contentious topics? What gives an anthropologist cultural expertise on questions of race?

ChorSwang Ngin, professor of anthropology and founder of the Asian and Asian American Studies Program at California State University, Los Angeles, will deliver the 2022 distinguished lecture of the General Anthropology Division. Ngin is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on connections among the topics of race, ethnicity, and culture. This lecture draws on her experience testifying in American courtrooms, providing cultural expertise on “race” and verifying persecution on the basis of “race” for asylum seekers from Asia. Lessons from these cases lead Ngin to argue for disarticulating the idea of race from racism and employing the idea of racialization to examine racism, while abandoning completely the idea of race. She also proposes a shift from “race” to a host of alternative terms and concepts with a focus on positionality and relationality.

Ngin’s work as a cultural expert, applying anthropology in asylum cases is the basis of her book Identities on Trial in the United States (Lexington Books, 2018).

Audra Simpson presented the 2019 GAD Distinguished Lecture entitled Empire of Feeling. Dr. Simpson is a political anthropologist whose work is focused on contextualizing the force and consequences of governance through time, space and bodies. Her research and writing is rooted within Indigenous polities in the US and Canada and crosses the fields of anthropology, Indigenous Studies, American and Canadian Studies, gender and sexuality studies as well as politics. Her recent research is a genealogy of affective governance and extraction across the US and Canada.

Her book, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (2014, DUP) won the Sharon Stephens Prize (AES), the “Best first Book Award” (NAISA) as well as the Lora Romero Award (ASA) in addition to honorable mentions. It was a Choice Academic Title for 2014. In 2010, she won the School of General Studies “Excellence in Teaching Award.”

The 2018 GAD Distinguished Lecture was delivered by award-winning Cuban-American anthropologist and writer Professor Ruth Behar of the University of Michigan.

“Anthropology and the Search for Home: Reflections of an Immigrant Ethnographer.”

Pico Iyer has said that, in our time, “home has less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.” Behar’s lecture addressed the complex topic of what home signifies in our era of massive displacement. Delving into her own immigrant story and her ethnographic journeys to Spain, Mexico, and Cuba, Behar reflected on the complex ways that vulnerability informs her work and spoke about the current immigration crisis and its meaning for anthropology.

“Why I Haven’t Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, or Anthropological Observations on the Political Economy of Digital Technology.”

Regna Darnell gave the 2016 GAD Distinguished Lecture, Who Was Franz Boas? How Do We Know? And Why Should We Care? on the Franz Boas Papers Project and the cultivation of indigenous partnerships to recontextualize the material that is an ongoing part of it at the 115th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Minneapolis, Nov. 18, 2016.

Jonathan Marks, Professor of Anthropology at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, gave the GAD Distinguished Lecture at the 114th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Denver, Nov. 20, 2015.

Dr. Richard Kurin, Under Secretary for History, Art and Culture, Smithsonian Institute, gave the 2014 GAD Distinguished Lecture in Washington, D.C., December 5, 2014.

Bruno Latour gave the GAD Distinguished Lecture at the AAA annual meetings in Chicago, November 22, 2013.

Richard Klein gave the GAD Distinguished Lecture at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings in San Francisco, Nov. 16, 2012.

Richard Borshay Lee gave the GAD Distinguished Lecture at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Montreal, Quebec, November 18, 2011.