Talk by Dr. Lex Lu on Appearance Politics in China, Lecture, October 23, 2022, Massachusetts, United States

 

 

Subject Fields: 

Asian History / Studies, Chinese History / Studies, Cultural History / Studies, East Asian History / Studies, Women's & Gender History / Studies

Dr. Lex Lu, Assistant Professor of East Asian history and gender studies at Clark University, will give a talk on Wed, Oct 12 at 2PM in the Sheehan Multipurpose Room at Worcester State University on the history of Asian political masculinities and male beauty standards.  His talk, “Appearance Politics: The Transformation of Images of Power in Late Imperial and Modern China,” will explore the role of “appearance politics” in building political legitimacy in modern China.  He will discuss the textual and visual records of political imagery and will recount the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of image cultivation.

Contact Info: 

Martin T. Fromm, Associate Professor, East Asian History, Worcester State University

Contact Email: 

mfromm@worcester.edu

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On Areítos and Open Sanctuaries in the Ancestral Antilles: Reflections on Arte del mar

James Doyle (Penn State): "On Areítos and Open Sanctuaries in the Ancestral Antilles: Reflections on Arte del mar"

Feb 4, 2022 04:00 PM EST, via Zoom

Dr. James A. Doyle, Director of the Matson Museum of Anthropology and Associate Research Professor at the Pennsylvania State University, will present a lecture on ideas of sanctuary, ritual knowledge, and performance in the lands around the rim of the Caribbean Sea as seen in objects created by artists from the Taíno civilizations and their peers.

The lecture is free and open to the public; advanced registration is required: https://temple.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_zGYS36XsQSSIiKyZ1MLxjw

This event is sponsored by the Department of Art History, Tyler School of Art and Architecture; the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Center for the Humanities at Temple (CHAT), College of Liberal Arts; and the University General Activities Fund (GAF), Temple University.

 

Hadza ogresses, mountains, trees and giants - Public Lecture in Anthropology by Dr. Camilla Power (UCL)

 

The third Public Lecture in Anthropology at the University of Plymouth on Tuesday 7^th December at 19.00 (GMT) is titled:
“Hadza ogresses, mountains, trees and giants”, and will be delivered by Dr. Camilla Power (University College London)
and chaired by Dr. Ivan Tacey and Dr. Brian Campbell.
 

For the Hadza hunter-gatherers of the Tanzanian Rift Valley, some of the scariest, most powerful figures in story are cannibalistic ogresses – older women who are rapacious for meat. Taking various, gender ambiguous guises, these ‘monster mothers-in-law’ may try to eat their  would-be sons-in-law, and generally aim to thwart men having sex. They are implicated in the first fire, the first sex, and the first epeme feast of sacred meat, as well as control of night and day. In this fascinating talk Dr Camilla Power will explore these stories and their links to the Hadza landscape of ‘god’ mountains, baobab trees and the mythic formation of the Lake Eyasi Basin.

 

The talk is the fourth social anthropological contribution to The University of Plymouth’s Public Arts Programme. The central theme for this season is “Storytelling”.  We explore how humans have used the written or spoken word, music, sound, image and performance to tell stories. Most crucially, we examine stories as powerful instruments that enable us to understand, navigate and shape the very world around us. This season, the Arts Institute is also proud to host “Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters”. This award-winning exhibition takes visitors on an epic journey that traverses three states, three deserts and some 500,000 square kilometres, travelling from west to east: to places in the deserts of the Martu, the Ngaanyatjarra and the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) peoples. Using the power of contemporary art, performance, song, photography and multimedia, Songlines shares ancient stories from the world’s oldest continuing culture. Songlines is conceived and curated by a team of First Australians, led by Margo Neale, Senior Indigenous Curator at the National Museum of Australia and custodial elders from the Central and Western Deserts of Australia.
 

The lecture will be held through Zoom, and is free for everyone who wishes to attend. Please register here: https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/whats-on/autumn-2021-hadza-ogresses-mountains-trees-and-giants

If you have any questions, would like to know more about Anthropology at the University of Plymouth, or wish to participate in our Public Arts Programme, please email brian.campbell@plymouth.ac.uk.

David Buchan Lecture 2016 - Valdimar Hafstein - Copyrighting Tradition

by Nicolas Le Bigre

Dear all,

The Elphinstone Institute is pleased to announce that the 2016 David Buchan Lecture will take place at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, on Thursday, 10 November at 18:30 (13:30 Eastern Time), and will be live streamed for our friends who are unable to be there in person (link here: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/.../public.../david-buchan-live-stream).

'Copyrighting Tradition in the Internet Age: Creativity, Authorship and Folklore'
Professor Valdimar Tr. Hafstein
Dept. of Folklore, Ethnology, and Museum Studies, University of Iceland
President of the Société Internationale d'Ethnologie et de Folklore (SIEF).

University event page: http://abdn.ac.uk/elphinstone/public-engagement/david-buchan-lecture
Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1126850497394365/

Abstract: Should we copyright culture? How can one compose a one-hundred-year-old traditional lullaby? Who owns Cinderella? And what would the Brothers Grimm say? What is the historical provenance of such Catch-22s? While we may not resolve them in this talk, the lessons we learn from picking them apart can inform our thinking about creativity and agency in contemporary culture.

In 1844, Hans Christian Andersen accused the Brothers Grimm of stealing his tale 'The Princess and the Pea'. That Andersen elsewhere attributes this tale to oral tradition (he heard it as a child) seems not to preclude it from becoming something that others could steal from him. Bizarre? Actually, it's not such an unusual story and the United Nations even has a special committee negotiating a new international convention that addresses such appropriations of traditional culture and traditional knowledge, in music, in medicine, and in visual and verbal art.

Beginning with the paradoxical case of a traditional lullaby that acquired a composer late in its life and 'fell into' copyright, this talk grapples with representations of creative agency - such as authorship and tradition - that are endowed with the force of law through the copyright regime. My motivation is to understand the dichotomies that shape understandings of creativity so that we will be better placed to undermine them, to liberate our imagination from their powerful hold, and to imagine creativity in alternative terms.

In a digital age, such acts of liberation and imagination are badly needed; creativity is still enclosed in categories from another era and bogged down by the weight of nineteenth-century romantic ideals about the author.

Valdimar Tr. Hafstein is a Professor in the Department of Ethnology, Folklore, and Museum Studies at the University of Iceland. He completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004. He has published a number of articles and edited volumes on folklore, intangible heritage, international heritage politics, cultural property, and copyright in traditional knowledge. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, Croatian, and Danish. Valdimar is president of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) and a former chair of the Icelandic Commission for UNESCO.
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The David Buchan Lecture was launched in 2015 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Elphinstone Institute. The lecture is in memory of the influential ballad and contemporary legend scholar who was also the Institute's first appointed director. This annual event places Ethnology and Folklore firmly in the university calendar and appeals to a wide audience across the university as well as to the general public.

Kind regards,
Nicolas Le Bigre
____________________
Nicolas Le Bigre
Teaching Fellow and PhD Candidate
The Elphinstone Institute
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen, AB24 5UA
United Kingdom
+44 (0) 1224 272997
n.lebigre@abdn.ac.uk