Sociology and Anthropology

Norman Vorano, curator of Contemporary Inuit Art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, in Gatineau, Quebec, will deliver a lecture entitled Things that Matter: How Inuit Artists Create Meaning on April 10 at 7 pm in the Visual Arts Center, Kresge Auditorium on the Bowdoin College campus. The lecture marks the opening of The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum’s newest exhibit, Spirits of Land, Air, and Water: Antler Carvings from the Robert and Judith Toll Collection. Following the talk the museum will host a reception at 8 pm in the foyer of Hubbard Hall.Guests will also be able to tour the exhibit at that time.

Vorano, who holds a degree in Interdisciplinary Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, has worked with Inuit art and Inuit artists for over a decade. He has studied the history of Inuit printmaking, the influence of Japanese printers and printmaking on Inuit printmakers, and the many ways in which Inuit art is part of the modern world. At the Museum of Civilization he curated the exhibit Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration; Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic, and the online exhibit Inuit Prints from Cape Dorset.

“We are very excited to have Dr. Vorano here to deliver what promises to be a very interesting and lively talk,” reports curator Genevieve LeMoine, “His perspective on the place of art in Inuit society, and in the south, is refreshing and I’m sure he will have interesting stories about his work with the artists.” Verano’s talk will examine the ways that Inuit artists use their art to create meaning for themselves, for their communities, and for their southern audiences.

Following the talk guests will be welcomed to the new exhibit, which features over 30 caribou antler carvings from the Canadian Arctic, as well as a selection of Inuit prints highlighting the importance of caribou in Inuit culture. 

For more information visit our web page at www.bowdoin.edu/arctic-museum  or call 207-725-3416.

Please join us for a film screening of Edge of America and conversation with Chris Eyre, director of Smoke Signals.  Eyre, considered to be the preeminent Native American filmmaker of his time, has received numerous accolades for Edge of American including the Peabody Award, a Writer's Guild Award, and a Humanitus Prize. It premiered in the highly coveted opening night film at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.  

Dr. Winnie Wong, Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, explores the unlikely connections among photojournalism, documentary photography, and conceptual art in depictions of Dafen village, the world's largest production center for hand-painted art products.

This lecture explores the visual rhetorics of manual labor and creativity in China's most famous cultural site and traces the value of "truth" in American journalists', artists', and photographers' representations of China.

Sponsored by the Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund, the Asian Studies Program, and the Department of Art History.

Open to the public and free of charge.

Events with Janisse Ray:

Thursday, March 28th
11:30 am - 12:30 pm: Lunch at the Outing Club
12:30 pm -2:00 pm Shuttle and tours of Milkweed Farm, Brunswick
7:00 pm: Dinner with Students and Faculty at Ladd House (limited seating)

Friday, March 29th
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm Lecture: The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (Kresge Auditorium), book signing to follow in the Kresge Lobby. The lecture is open to the public free of charge

Janisse Ray is writer, naturalist and activist, and the author of four books of literary nonfiction and a collection of nature poetry. She is on the faculty of Chatham University's low-residency MFA program and is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana.
In her most recent book The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food, Ray writes about the renaissance of local food, farming, and place-based culinary traditions taking hold across the country and of something small, critically important, and profoundly at risk that is being overlooked in this local food resurgence: seeds. We are losing our seeds. Of the thousands of seed varieties available at the turn of the 20th century, 94 percent have been lost-forever.

Copies of the book are available at Hatch Science Library and H & L Library, along with free electronic versions on library Kindles.

Join a Book Discussion over lunch or dinner:
Monday, March 25 Dinner with Ian Kline, Mitchell South, Thorne, 5:30-7:00 pm
Tuesday, March 26 Lunch with Sara Cawthon, North Dining Room, Moulton Union, 11:30 am-1:00 pm
Wednesday, March 27 Dinner with Andrew Cushing, North Dining Room, Moulton Union, 5:30- 7:00 pm

In 1989, five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem were arrested and later convicted of raping a white woman in New York City's Central Park. They spent between 6 and 13 years in prison before a serial rapist confessed that he alone had committed the crime, leading to their convictions being overturned.

Set against a backdrop of a decaying city beset by violence and racial tension, The Central Park Five will tell the story of that horrific crime, the rush to judgment by the police, a media clamoring for sensational stories and an outraged public, and the five lives upended by this miscarriage of justice.

Shaka McGlotten is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Media, Society, and the Arts at Purchase College-SUNY. He teaches about digital culture and new media, and studies how media technologies intersect with ideologies of gender, sexuality, and race.

In his public lecture, The Political Aesthetics of Drag, Professor McGlotten will consider drag more broadly as a possible model for nourishing aesthetic forms that creatively respond to the constraints of modern nation-states. From underground dance clubs to galleries and political protests, he contends that these and other theatrical modes of cross-dressing simultaneously operate both at the margins of cultural production and at its centers. Ultimately, these performers, as well as the aesthetic value of their spectacularly staged gender crossings, form part of the larger whole of queer cultural histories as well as globally circulating ideas about queer difference. In the end, Professor McGlotten argues that these theatrical performances are an aesthetic product that invites its participants and audiences to reconsider notions of personal and collective autonomy.

Brought to you by Gay and Lesbian Studies, Africana Studies, and the departments of English and Sociology & Anthropology

With Maine's vast tracts of corporate and recently-divested forest lands, and with its many struggling timber-dependent communities, our state shares more in common with large Western states than with the rest of New England.

Kathryn DeMaster and Melanie Parker will draw parallels and contrasts between the cultural and economic landscapes of Maine's forested northern rim and the American West, both of which have been shaped by large absentee landowners. In light of Maine's on-going dialogue over development of Plum Creek lands in the Moosehead Lake region, these issues resonate locally.

Kathryn DeMaster's work centers on sustainable agriculture and rural development. She is an Assistant Professor of Agriculture, Society and Food Security at UC Berkeley. Melanie Parker is a charismatic and outspoken national leader in conservation-oriented sustainable rural development. In 2007 in her home state of Montana, Parker helped broker the nation's largest land conservation deal to date, protecting over 310,000 acres under unique conservation easements. She is the Founder and Executive Director of
Northwest Connections.

Together, DeMaster and Parker are investigating opportunities for resilient multifunctional rural development in Montana's Swan Valley.

Students and faculty are invited to join a discussion with professor of Anthropology Dr. Stuart Kirsch.

Professor Kirsch has consulted widely on indigenous rights and environmental issues, including work on mining and property rights in the Solomon Islands, compensation for damages caused by nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands, and conservation and development in the Lakekamu River Basin of Papua New Guinea. From 2000-2002, Kirsch was a participant in a collaborative research project on cultural property rights at the University of Cambridge. He was recently funded by ESRC-SSRC to provide a comparative perspective on a joint research project on mining conflicts in Latin America. He is the sponsor of a collaborative research project on mining and corporate social responsibility with several graduate and post-doctoral students. Kirsch also collaborates with Amerindian communities in Suriname on the impact of bauxite mining and a court case on indigenous land rights.

Professor Kirsch received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 and taught at Mount Holyoke College before coming to the University of Michigan in 1995.

A talk from his forthcoming book, Mining Capitalism: Dialectical Relations between Corporations and their Critics. In his talk, Dr. Kirsch will examine how corporations strategically produce and deploy science. Building on critiques of tobacco industry sponsored science and the research practices of the pharmaceutical industry, it draws on long-term ethnography of the mining industry to argue that the problems associated with corporate science are intrinsic to contemporary capitalism rather than restricted to particular firms or industries.

Stuart Kirsch is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

Why the anti-gay repression of the 1950s? One leading answer points to the social impact of the Second World War and post-war demobilization. Far-reaching shifts in gender roles created opportunities for political elites to promote gender conformity. But if society was already deeply homophobic, why were there no gay rights groups before the repression of the 1950s? No such groups emerged in fact until the federal government promoted anti-gay stigma. This talk will describe how and why anti-gay repression broke out within the federal government, creating an era of "straight government" that has taken until the Obama presidency to completely dismantle.

The principal speaker will be Rick Valelly, Claude C. Smith '14 Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College, where he has taught since 1993. Professor Valelly is the author of American Politics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013), The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Radicalism in the States: The American Political Economy and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party (University of Chicago Press, 1989). In 2009 he published Princeton Readings in American Politics. Professor Valelly is currently researching the political development of LGBT rights in the U.S. with a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Commenting upon Professor Valelly's talk will be Steve Engel, an Assistant Professor of Politics at Bates College. He is the author of two books, The Unfinished Revolution: Social Movement Theory and the Gay and Lesbian Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and American Politicians Confront the Court: Opposition Politics and Changing Responses to Judicial Power (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Professor Engel is currently working on a new book which examines sexuality from a developmental perspective and which aims to shed light on how US governing institutions define the parameters of sexual citizenship and how that process reflexively affects the development of the state.

Sponsored by the Department of Government & Legal Studies with support from the John C. Donovan Lecture Fund. Co-sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Studies Program, and The Resource Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity.

Free and open to the public.

Join us for the Latin American and Spanish Film Festival, celebrate the culture and the language, and expand your understanding of world cinema!

A surreal black comedy set in Chile, presented by Sarah Childress, Film Studies Research Associate, wraps up a week of riveting, thought-provoking, and entertaining Latin American and Spanish films.

POST MORTEM
Pablo Larrain first broke onto the international film scene when TONY MANERO premiered at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight, and he has another hit with his most recent film NO, a winner at Cannes, an official Sundance selection, and Chile's entry at the Academy Awards.

The Chilean director's sophomore effort is the visceral POST MORTEM, which competed at the 2011 Venice Film Festival. Mario Cornejo is going about his daily business of writing autopsy reports at the military hospital in Santiago when the Pinochet coup d' etat shakes him out of his political apathy. Neither a reconstruction of the Pinochet days nor an angry denunciation of the period, POST MORTEM is a surreal black comedy that shows how easy it is for ordinary people to participate in atrocities, either as victims, collaborators, or both.

(Pablo Larrain, 98 minutes, Drama, 2010, Spanish with English Subtitles)

Sponsored by a grant from the Spanish Film Club, the Blythe Bickel Edwards fund, Latin American Studies Program, Bowdoin Film Society, Department of Romance Languages, Latin American Student Organization, Film Studies Program, Department of English, and Department of Music.

The Spanish Film Club series was made possible with the support of Pragda, the Secretary of State for Culture of Spain, and its Program for Cultural Cooperation with United States' Universities.

Join us for the Latin American and Spanish Film Festival, celebrate the culture and the language, and expand your understanding of world cinema!

For the fourth night of the film festival, Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Assistant Professor of Music, presents an animated love story and introduces us to the music, culture, and people of Cuba:

CHICO Y RITA
Oscar-winning director Fernando Trueba and Barcelona designer and artist Javier Mariscal have teamed up to make CHICO AND RITA, an animated love story starring the music, culture, and people of Cuba.

When dashing piano player Chico meets beautiful Havana nightclub singer Rita, sparks fly and they fall madly in love. Their romance unfolds as they perform on the glamorous stages of 1940s-1950s Havana, New York City, Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Paris. Accompanying them is an amazing soundtrack featuring the music of jazz legends Thelonious Monk, Cole Porter, Dizzy Gillespie and Freddy Cole (brother of Nat King Cole), performed by a range of contemporary musicians, including Idania Valds, Carlos Sarduy Horacio Hernndez, Rolando Luna, Germn Velazco, Jorge Reyes, and Chano Pozo.

CHICO AND RITA pays tribute to a vibrant and colorful time in the history of Cuba and jazz.

(Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal & Tono Errando, 94 minutes, Animation, 2010, Spanish and English with English subtitles)

Sponsored by a grant from the Spanish Film Club, the Blythe Bickel Edwards fund, Latin American Studies Program, Bowdoin Film Society, Department of Romance Languages, Latin American Student Organization, Film Studies Program, Department of English, and Department of Music.

The Spanish Film Club series was made possible with the support of Pragda, the Secretary of State for Culture of Spain, and its Program for Cultural Cooperation with United States' Universities.