May 8–9, 2012
Things in Motion: Object Histories, Biographies, and Itineraries
Co-chaired by Susan D. Gillespie, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Florida and Rosemary A. Joyce, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
Objects accrue histories as they move from place to place, person to person. This seminar explored how object histories may alternatively be viewed as “itineraries,” strings of places where objects come to rest or are active, the routes through which things circulate and the means by which they come to move.
October 3–4, 2012
Artisan Production and the World Market: Collaborating in Theory, Methods, and Practice
Co-chaired by June Nash, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Department of Anthropology, City University of New York; Katherine O’Donnell, Professor, Department of Sociology, Hartwick College; and Jeanne Simonelli, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Wake Forest University
The purpose of this seminar, a collaborative arrangement between SAR and the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), was to bring together an interdisciplinary, intercultural group of artisans and the scholars who work with them to discuss the production, marketing, and consumption of crafts and boutique food products.
October 12–13, 2012
Uniting the Histories of Slavery in North America
Co-chaired by James F. Brooks, President and CEO, School for Advanced Research and Bonnie Martin, Research Associate, Department of History, Southern Methodist University
This seminar brought together specialists in history, anthropology, folklore, and psychology to provide a broader understanding to an array of local and regional studies of new forms of bondage—in the past and today—that take us beyond the well-known studies of slavery in the east.
October 26–28, 2012
Fieldwork in Philosophy
Chaired by Ann Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies, The New School for Social Research
Legend has it that when a discipline is in crisis, it invariably turns to philosophy. While such claims tend to contain a grain of truth, the organizers of this short seminar saw the current “philosophical turn” in anthropology very differently—as a move that marks a broader set of emergent realignments in anthropology’s approach to how concepts operate in the world. Rather than seeing this as a moment of anthropology in crisis, this seminar explored it as a vital, generative moment of possible synergy between the two disciplines.