Of Winds, Worms and Fertility: The Meci Festival in Timor-Leste
Seminar
This seminar focuses on indigenous calendars, environmental practices and ritual feasting in relation to the Meci festival in Timor-Leste. ‘Meci’ is the name given to the Palolo worm in the Fataluku language. The Meci festival takes place when Palolo emerge to spawn along the nearshore of the…
The Marginal Languages of Colonial Belief
Seminar
At what point did colonized peoples come to be recognized as objects of evangelistic attention? When were their languages recognized as media for the transmission of truth? I argue that in certain contexts of Protestant missionization, concepts of speaker sincerity and colonial fears of laborers’…
Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border
Seminar
Since the nineteenth century, a succession of states has classified the inhabitants of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim 'frontier peasants', 'savage mountaineers', and Christian 'ethnic minorities', suspecting them of disloyalty. This talk follows the struggles of cattle traders and…
The Repatriation Movement in Aotearoa New Zealand with Dr Amber Aranui
Seminar
Zoom event link: shorturl.at/uCGO8 This presentation will look at the development of the fast growing repatriation Movement in Aotearoa New Zealand. A particular emphasis will be placed on the return of Māori and Moriori human remains from museum and university collections from within both…
Book Launch: Philanthropic Foundations in International Development Rockefeller, Ford and Gates
Book launch
This book focuses on the influence of philanthropic foundations in global development, and on how the global south has engaged with them. The idea of corporate philanthropy stretches back a long way, with the late 19th industrialist Andrew Carnegie seeing it as an important obligation of the very…
Humanitarian Confessions: Ethnography, Autobiography and the Locations of Religion in Aidland
Seminar
Humanitarian autobiographies provide compelling windows for analysing the locations of religion within the international aid and development sector. Free from the genre constraints of fundraising appeals or development scholarship, religion and spirituality are frequently given considerable space…
Exploring stress and social inequality through the lens of spatial bioarchaeology
Seminar
Zoom Link : shorturl.at/gjzDK Advances in the bioarchaeological conceptualization of inequality have emphasized social power the driver of variation in social status. These power imbalances become embodied in the skeleton as skeletal stress markers, allowing the identification of structural…