Saturday, March 31, 2012
1:00 - 6:00 p.m.
School of Natural Resources and Environment
University of Michigan
Samuel T. Dana Building
440 Church St.,
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1041
Kiran Asher is an interdisciplinary scholar whose training is grounded in two decades of field-based research in Latin America and South Asia. Her publications include a monograph, Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacific Lowlands(Duke University Press, 2009). Her current project examines how environmental issues open, and circumscribe, new spaces for the expression of social, cultural and livelihood concerns of subaltern communities in Colombia and India. Her approaches to these themes emerge from her analytical engagement with postcolonialism, feminism, and marxism, and her political commitment to social change.
Allison R. Davis is an anthropological archaeologist interested in the origins and maintenance of inequality in Andean societies. Her work takes a holistic approach to understanding daily life in the early village of Yuthu in Cusco, Peru (400-100 BC). An important part of her research considers how early agropastoralists exploited vertical Andean ecology and how they perceived the local landscape in sacred and political terms. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Oberlin College. She received her A.B. in Anthropology from Dartmouth College and M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan.
Bruce Mannheim, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, is a leading linguistic anthropologist who specializes in Quechua. His work focuses on the intersection of language and cultural and social relationships. He is author of The Dialogic Emergence of Culture (coedited with Dennis Tedlock, University of Illinois Press, 1995) and The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion(University of Texas Press, 1991) and is completing books on Quechua poetry and narrative. His most recent research is a historical study of Quechua texts as indices of national formation. His interestes include the politics of language use, social theory, poetics and narrative, and historical ethnography. Formerly the director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan, Mannheim has been the recipient of both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He holds a PhD in anthropology and in linguistics from the University of Chicago.
Keely Maxwell is an environmental anthropologist and teaches environmental studies at Franklin and Marshall College. She has conducted interdisciplinary ethnographic, ecological, and historical research in the Peruvian Andes for over a decade. Her research interests in Machu Picchu include forest-society relations, tourism and development, rural livelihood strategies, and the cultural politics of heritage conservation. She is working on two other research projects on issues of vicuña conservation via commodification and heritage entrepreneurship and stewardship.
Tom Perreault is Associate Professor of Geography at Syracuse University. His research interests focus on the political ecologies of resource governance, indigenous-campesino social mobilization and the micropolitics of rural livelihoods, with a particular focus on Bolivia and Ecuador. His doctoral dissertation research focused on indigenous mobilization in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and associated struggles over identity, territory, and rural development. Since 2002 he has worked in Bolivia, where he has examined irrigation politics and rural water governance, national/nationalist struggles over natural gas, the cultural politics of indigeneity, and most recently the co-production of mining, water and rural livelihoods.
Corinne Valdivia is associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Division of Applied Social Sciences, College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Her research in the Andes has focused on collective action in pastoral communities and cooperatives in Perú in the 1980s; a collaborative multidisciplinary research program on Sustainable Agropastoral Systems in the Bolivian Altiplano in the 1990s; a collaborative research program on Climate Variability and Wellbeing in the Andes, focusing on the Central Altiplano of Bolivia and South Altiplano of Peru from 1998-2003; and more recently an interdisciplinary collaborative research and capacity building program, Adapting to Change in Andean Ecosystems of the Altiplano of Peru and Bolivia. Her other research focuses on the Asset Accumulation Strategies of Latinos in the Midwest and the process of integration of newcomers since 2002, and multifuctionality and Agroforestry in landscapes of Missouri, USA.
Catherine Badgley is a paleontologist and ecologist. Her research interests are the ecology, evolution, and biogeography of mammals, the current biodiversity crisis, and sustainable agriculture. She is a Research Scientist at the Museum of Paleontology and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She lives on an organic farm in Chelsea, Michigan.
Marisol de la Cadena is an anthropologist with an extensive body of research in Latin America, particularly the Andes. Her research interests include Politics and the Political, Cultures of History and Memory, Science and Technology Studies (STS) (particularly the interface of Science/Politics), World Anthropologies, Race Critical Theory, Anthropology of the States. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Among her book-length publications are Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru (Duke UP, 2000; 2d ed., 2003) and Archives of Nature-Culture: Indigenous Politics in the Andes (forthcoming); she has also edited Formaciones de Indianidad. Articulaciones Raciales, mestizaje y Nación en America Latina (Bogotá: Envión Eds., 2007) and (with Orin Starn) Indigenous Experience Today (London: Berg, 2007).
Samuel T. Dana Building
440 Church St.,
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1041
On Saturday, March 31 2012, the Michigan Andeanists of Círculo Micaela Bastidas Phuyuqhawa (Andean Circle) will host a multidisciplinary research symposium entitled "Transforming Landscapes in Andean Societies”. This symposium intends to bring professors and community leaders together to share presentations on a variety of subjects related to issues of environmental change in the Andean republics. By hearing perspectives from a range of disciplines, undergraduates and graduate students will be encouraged to consider the linkages between the social and natural sciences in addressing contemporary environmental change.
The Andes region is a diverse expansion of territory in South America, one characterized by plurinationalities, vast environmental and social diversity, and an extensive history of human-landscape relations. Given the incredible ethnic diversity of the communities of people living in the Andean republics, our speakers have been selected to provide a scope of the immense struggles faced by marginalized indigenous peoples, from Quechua and Aymara speakers in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, to coastal Afro-Colombian populations in their fight for social and environmental justice.
We believe our symposium will provide a forum in which students will be encouraged to think across disciplines in relation to human-environment relationships, developing a sense of the complexity of contemporary environmental and social issues in this region of the world. Our goals for the symposium are to work towards a clearer understanding of the driving forces of environmental degradation and inequitable development in the Andes, how environmental change empowers people to mobilize for social and environmental justice, and how we-- as students, academics, and community members-- can advance our studies and involvement in the Andean region.
Keynote Speaker: Hilaria Supa
Hilaria Supa was a member of the Peruvian congress from 2006-2011, and was the first congresswoman in Peru’s history to take the oath in Quechua upon her election. She currently serves in the Andean Parliament, an organization representing the nations of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. She has written an autobiography, Threads of my Life (2008), about her struggles as a Quechua woman in rural Peru and her role as an activist against the forced sterilization of Quechua women. She continues to represent the interests of Quechua indigenous and women’s organizations and supports environmental campaigns addressing pesticide use, land reform, and traditional medicine preservation.
Presenters
Kiran Asher is an interdisciplinary scholar whose training is grounded in two decades of field-based research in Latin America and South Asia. Her publications include a monograph, Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacific Lowlands(Duke University Press, 2009). Her current project examines how environmental issues open, and circumscribe, new spaces for the expression of social, cultural and livelihood concerns of subaltern communities in Colombia and India. Her approaches to these themes emerge from her analytical engagement with postcolonialism, feminism, and marxism, and her political commitment to social change.
Bruce Mannheim, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, is a leading linguistic anthropologist who specializes in Quechua. His work focuses on the intersection of language and cultural and social relationships. He is author of The Dialogic Emergence of Culture (coedited with Dennis Tedlock, University of Illinois Press, 1995) and The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion(University of Texas Press, 1991) and is completing books on Quechua poetry and narrative. His most recent research is a historical study of Quechua texts as indices of national formation. His interestes include the politics of language use, social theory, poetics and narrative, and historical ethnography. Formerly the director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan, Mannheim has been the recipient of both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He holds a PhD in anthropology and in linguistics from the University of Chicago.
Tom Perreault is Associate Professor of Geography at Syracuse University. His research interests focus on the political ecologies of resource governance, indigenous-campesino social mobilization and the micropolitics of rural livelihoods, with a particular focus on Bolivia and Ecuador. His doctoral dissertation research focused on indigenous mobilization in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and associated struggles over identity, territory, and rural development. Since 2002 he has worked in Bolivia, where he has examined irrigation politics and rural water governance, national/nationalist struggles over natural gas, the cultural politics of indigeneity, and most recently the co-production of mining, water and rural livelihoods.
Corinne Valdivia is associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Division of Applied Social Sciences, College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Her research in the Andes has focused on collective action in pastoral communities and cooperatives in Perú in the 1980s; a collaborative multidisciplinary research program on Sustainable Agropastoral Systems in the Bolivian Altiplano in the 1990s; a collaborative research program on Climate Variability and Wellbeing in the Andes, focusing on the Central Altiplano of Bolivia and South Altiplano of Peru from 1998-2003; and more recently an interdisciplinary collaborative research and capacity building program, Adapting to Change in Andean Ecosystems of the Altiplano of Peru and Bolivia. Her other research focuses on the Asset Accumulation Strategies of Latinos in the Midwest and the process of integration of newcomers since 2002, and multifuctionality and Agroforestry in landscapes of Missouri, USA.
Discussants
Catherine Badgley is a paleontologist and ecologist. Her research interests are the ecology, evolution, and biogeography of mammals, the current biodiversity crisis, and sustainable agriculture. She is a Research Scientist at the Museum of Paleontology and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She lives on an organic farm in Chelsea, Michigan. Marisol de la Cadena is an anthropologist with an extensive body of research in Latin America, particularly the Andes. Her research interests include Politics and the Political, Cultures of History and Memory, Science and Technology Studies (STS) (particularly the interface of Science/Politics), World Anthropologies, Race Critical Theory, Anthropology of the States. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Among her book-length publications are Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru (Duke UP, 2000; 2d ed., 2003) and Archives of Nature-Culture: Indigenous Politics in the Andes (forthcoming); she has also edited Formaciones de Indianidad. Articulaciones Raciales, mestizaje y Nación en America Latina (Bogotá: Envión Eds., 2007) and (with Orin Starn) Indigenous Experience Today (London: Berg, 2007). 
Sponsors
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Institute for the Humanities
International Institute
Latin America and Caribbean Environmental Group
Office of the President
Office of the Provost
Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop
School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE)
SNRE Student Government
The Department of Anthropology
Institute for the Humanities
International Institute
Latin America and Caribbean Environmental Group
Office of the President
Office of the Provost
Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop
School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE)
SNRE Student Government
The Department of Anthropology